To fight God, and to win.

One day, God said to Moses:

“I’ll give you a land of milk and honey, with snowy mountains on top, a shiny desert in the south, olive trees everywhere, and a perfect beach all around it.”

Moses asked: “What’s the catch?”

To which God replied: “Wait ’till you see the neighbours”.

When my Israeli friend Michael told me this joke, I laughed, because apart from being funny, it is true. Living in the Promised Land, in a way, is a daily psychological struggle. Terrorists can strike at any time, shooting you when you are enjoying a stroll on the Tel Avivian tayelet, or sipping an espresso on a terrace.

On the 6th of April 2023, the Iron Dome intercepted 100 missiles fired from Lebanon within 10 minutes. But the technology is not infallible. The missiles it fails to destroy can fall on your house and kill your entire family in the blink of an eye.

The country you call home is being vilified by most media-outlets worldwide, and so are you. You’re the evil Jewish coloniser killing the poor oppressed Arabs. Nearly the entire globe hates you, or at least frowns upon you. One country publicly announces it wants to ‘wipe you off the map’. A genocidal threat not taken seriously by the international community, signing a deal allowing it to enrich expand their uranium capacity to weapen-grade levels, for ‘scientifical research’.

Opinions are like assholes, everyone’s got one, right? Well, everyone definitely has an opinion about Israel – the only nation in the world whose right to exist is debated. It is also the only Jewish country in the world, which is precisely the reason its right to exist is so fiercely debated. If it was a Zoroastrian country, nobody would really care. People only care when Jews are involved. This is why the word ‘antizionism’ exists, and the word ‘antinigerianism’ doesn’t, even though humans rights in Nigeria are violated in a manner incomparable to what’s happening in Zion.

In Nigeria (and many other countries in the world, like France) little muslim girls are being cliterectomised. Radical islamists burn down Christian churches and homes, and slaughter the churchgoers and inhabitants. The women and girls are being raped and sold as sex slaves. People barely discuss these horrors, and if they do, the butchers are not being judged loud enough. But when a Palestinian gets killed in a defensive raid from the IDF, people become livid.

People are very selective in their condamnation of violence. They don’t love Palestinians – they envy Jews. If their outrage would truly be aimed at injustice in the world, they would riot at the doors of the embassies of Nigeria. Or Yemen, where pedophilia is legal, and 70-year-old grandfathers marry 10-year-old girls, and do not refrain from consuming the marriage. Or Saudi Arabia, where women are hanged in foorball stadiums because they wore nail polish.

And yet people discuss whether Israel, the only country in the Middle East that is not a dictatorship, where every religion is allowed to be practiced, where Jews and Arabs fight alongside in the Israeli army, where social security, health care and education is available to every citizen, regardsless of their ethnicity or belief, where members of the LGBTQ-community are not thrown off roofs but party with penis-shaped balloons in gay parades, should be allowed to exist.

This article will, however, not elaborate on Israel’s right to exist, but rather on the signification of its name, and how that name is reflective of its fate. As someone who is obsessed with dissecting words, I just had to know the etymological explanation, and why Israel has been named Israel.

The answer is quite surprising. One would think it means something positive, something hopeful, something that reflects the safety Jews feel in the only place on Earth where they are the majority, and are the least likely to be persecuted or discriminated against.

But that is not the case. The word Israel means, ‘he who struggled with God’.

As the story in Genesis, the first book of the Torah, tells us, a man called Yaacov had a dream, or according to Luther, a vision, in which he fought with an angel, who was the personifaction, or materialisation, of God.

Yaacov was also the son of Abraham, and because his twelve sons were the patriarchs of the twelve tribes that would form the people and the nation of Israel, he is also the symbolic father of the nation. It is surprising that this man, who did certainly not embody moral perfection, was chosen by God for such an important destiny. It is even more surprising that God chose to fight him first. But the most surprising is, that Yaacov actually won the fight, and received God’s blessing!

After the fight, God changed his name to Israel, reflecting Yaacov’s past (the fact he fought God) and his future (the founding of the nation of Israel).

If there is one opponent you are likely to lose against, it’s probably an almighty God. The story thus implies that you can engage in a fight with God, and that you even have a chance of defeating Him. What does this all mean?

This strange story, by the way, was depicted by many great painters, like Leloir and Gauguin. Regardless of the question if it really happened or not, it has, like all other stories in the Bible, a metaphorical value, aimed at making the reader understand a certain spiritual Truth. It reflects something that is profoundly true in all of our lives.

Yaacov struggles, and don’t we all? We struggle with a plethora of things: with our friends, our family, our own children, our collegues, our mind, our thoughts. We struggle with ourselves. Struggle is ubiquitous and inevitable, in each human life.

(Humans are not the only creatures to suffer, though. Animals and plants do, as well.)

We struggle because we are trying to cope with life. We are attempting to contend, as the world-reknowned psychologist Jordan B. Peterson put so eloquently, with the existential structure of reality. ‘To fight God’ is a metaphorical way of saying life is a battle – sometimes, a really harsh one – and, just like Yaacov suffered when the angel dislocated his hip, life will make you suffer. It’s a guarantee.

It sounds really pessimistic, doesn’t it? But it isn’t, because we struggle with a purpose, and that purpose is growth. ‘No pain, no gain’ is as valid in the material as in the immaterial realm. We suffer, but the good news is, we can rebel against the suffering, and overcome it, even if we are wounded. By taking responsibility, and understanding that we might be the cause of our own suffering.

We can be the victor of our own struggle, like a little plant that struggles its way through the dark Earth, but that keeps on growing until it finally breaks through the surface and reaches the sunlight.

The pain of lifting weights makes our muscles grow. The pain of life makes our soul grow.

The Jewish people have always suffered immensely: from the medieval inquisition, the pogroms in North Africa, the Shoah, the gulags of Stalin, to the current terror attacks in Israel, and the omnipresent anti-Semitism that stubbornly persists until today. They were not the only ones to suffer – all humans did, and still do. But it cannot be denied that the Jew has often been the first scapegoat, the first to blame for collective misfortunes of humanity.

The name Israel thus reflects the Jewish fate, but also the human condition – to struggle. But despite the tragedy the name contains, it also implies that, just like the outcome of Yaacov’s story, we can prevail. Israel, in that sense, means spiritual fulfillment – a state we are all able to attain, just like Yaacov. If only we are courageous enough to fight.