The blessings of the Shema come to a crescendo just before the silent Amidah begins. (For the music lovers among us, think of the explosive silence that follows the opening bars of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in d minor.) (For the baseball lovers, think about Kirk Gibson coming to the plate, when you hold your breath and just know….).
The last blessing after the Shema is about redemption, and the rabbis were very insistent on linking the prayer for redemption, Geulah, to the prayer, the Amidah. A close examination of the crucial last paragraph of Geulah tells us a great deal about Israel, and about G-d.
“Rock of Israel, rise to the defense of Israel, and redeem, as you have promised, Judah and Israel. Our Redeemer, the Lord of Hosts is His name, the Holy One of Israel. Blessed are You, Lord, Who redeemed Israel.”
As regards Israel: I am constantly amused by those who seek to downplay the national consciousness of the Jewish people. You don’t have to look very hard to find pretentious academic crackpots claiming that there never was a Jewish people, or that Zionism is a 19th century phenomenon started by Christians, or that the Jewish people never were expelled from Israel, etc.
Consider, for example, Shlomo Sand’s view: “[a]t a certain stage in the 19th century intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took upon themselves the task of inventing a people ‘retrospectively,’ out of a thirst to create a modern Jewish people. From historian Heinrich Graetz on, Jewish historians began to draw the history of Judaism as the history of a nation that had been a kingdom, became a wandering people and ultimately turned around and went back to its birthplace.”
File under: nonsense.
The Geulah prayer, a people begging for a promised redemption, goes back at least 1900 years (if not 2400 years—the historical sources at that point fade into legend). It is certainly anything but some 19th century invention.
The point is—no matter how much some would seek to deny it—the Jewish people are indeed a people. We are a people that faced the horrors of exile and lived to tell the tale, animated constantly by a passionate desire for a return to national sovereignty, about which we are made mindful literally multiple times every day.
Turning now to the theological question, it is hard to overstate the significance of the description of G-d as “Redeemer of Israel.” There are entire philosophies (think: Aristotle) based on the proposition that G-d (or the gods) just don’t get involved. The idea that they would intervene in human affairs was dismissed as impossible, if not nonsensical. For us Jews, on the other hand, it was obvious. The Lord, after all, defines Him/Herself as the One “Who took us out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”
To sum up, we are indeed a people that a merciful G-d indeed redeems. We are reminded of this daily, and that should lead us to understand just how privileged we are to watch that redemption come into focus.