One Hundred Year War

When did I study the Hundred Year War? Junior high, high school, college? Not only do I not remember when I learned about it, I also don’t remember at all what I learned.  All except the name and the impression it made on me.

courtesy of history.com

If the war had lasted one hundred years (actually it spanned from 1337 until 1454 making it one hundred and sixteen years long) that meant people were born and died without knowing what it was like to live in peace. It meant that they never celebrated a victory. On the flip side they never suffered the indignity of surrender.

As a child of the fifties, I grew up with emotional news reels of the American troops returning from Europe to tinker tape parades following World War Two.  I devoured historical novels that romanticized the end to the Great War and the Civil War and their returns to normalcy. How could someone live their whole life span with a war continuing on and on?

Yet, that’s the life I’m living now. In Israel we’re in the midst of an almost seventy-year war against many of our Arab neighbors who refuse to recognize our right to exist as a Jewish nation. Perhaps it’s more accurate to call it an eighty-nine year war and date it from the 1929 riots that began in Chevron.

Spreading out from the Middle East there’s a war of terror that seems to have no end in sight. Perhaps that’s the reason that, against all predictions, Donald Trump is becoming the forty-sixth American president. It’s interesting that among the Jews there are those who are sure he’ll be another Hitler, G-d forbid. There are also those who think he’ll be the best friend Israel has ever had in the White House. I pray the former are one hundred percent wrong and the later will not have their hopes dashed.

However, whether friend or foe to the Jewish people it’s important that we don’t pin our hopes on President Trump. Rather, we should turn to the Almighty, the true Maker of peace and war.

Truthfully, the war against the Jews didn’t began in 1948 or in 1929. It began centuries ago and it’s HaShem who will bring it to an end. I pray it will happen soon and I will merit to see true peace in my lifetime.