[TAG] Weather

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Benjamin A. Okopnik (ben at linuxgazette.net):

> On Wed, Apr 19, 2006 at 11:10:38PM -0400, Benjamin Okopnik wrote:
> > 
> > Um, yeah, actually. Israel was never a theocracy 
> 
> *Modern* Israel, I should have said. Not that anyone from a couple of
> thousand years ago was asking Einstein anything, but still worth
> clarifying.

In fact, the founding fathers of that state in 1948 were overwhelmingly
secular people (which is still true of its citizenry to this day), to 
the point where one of the few religious attendees, Moshe Shapira, tried
and failed to get a reference to God into the Declaration of
Independence draft, which was vetoed by the majority Labour Party
attendees.

Eventually, as a sop to make everyone happy, the concluding sentence was 
amended to read "With trust in the rock of Israel ["tzur Yisrael" in the
original Hebrew text]...."

Shapira was thus free to interpret it as a reference to "the Rock of
Israel" (i.e., God), while nearly everyone else could read it as a
poetic reference to the territory in question, and historical roots.