No one ever asks, "Why should India exist?" Or Albania. Or the United States. Or any country in the world.

Except for one country: Israel.

So, let me make this simple — and overly simplistic. Why does Israel exist? Here are my two R's of Israel.

• To rescue Jews who are persecuted. To save Jews from Jew-hatred. That was the wake-up call that Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl experienced during the trial of Alfred Dreyfus for treason in France in the early 1890s. He saw the mobs in the streets calling for death to the Jews. It caused him to sing a much earlier version of The Animals' classic song "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place." That urge became political Zionism. (How wonderful that we no longer have mobs in the streets chanting "Death to the Jews!" Oh. Wait. ... )

• The second reason is resurrection — of the Hebrew language, of Jewish culture and of Judaism itself. That, roughly speaking, is the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha'Am.

How are those two R's doing?

Listen to the podcast, as I interview Raquel Ukeles, chief editor of the new catalog of some of the richest of the library's holdings: "101 Treasures From the National Library of Israel." Ukeles serves as the library's head of collections. She earned a Ph.D. from Harvard in comparative Islamic and Jewish studies. She also studied Jewish law in Jerusalem and New York, and Islamic law and Arabic in Egypt, Morocco and the Netherlands.

Here is what you will learn.

The National Library of Israel is not a "Jewish" library.

Quite the contrary: It is an institution that cherishes and celebrates all aspects of Israeli society. One of its major collections is of Islam and the Middle East.

The library reaches way beyond Israel. it sees itself as a guardian of global cultural heritage, dedicated to democratizing knowledge, advancing education, promoting research and fostering dialogue. Its collection spans over 200 languages.

What would you find in their collections? I totally geeked out over this stuff.

The library enshrines how Jews understand the world. Yes, we begin with our people; yes, our people are rooted in our land; yes, we share the land with other peoples — and then we ascend to a universal sense of what the best of the humanities can offer.

As I went through "101 Treasures From the National Library of Israel," page by page, I wept.

Because this is the Israel that relatively few people, even Jews, know — and this is the Israel that our enemies want to destroy.

Not on my watch.

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