12/3 Courage to continue on, despite all the potholes in his path

That is the strength that Jacob handed down to the Jewish people. What really blows the mind though is that this small minority of people survived tragedies that would have annihilated any other people group. One need only look at decades of slavery in Egypt, destruction of two Temples, Babylonian and Roman conquest, the expulsions, persecutions, and pogroms of the Middle Ages, the rise of antisemitism in the nineteenth century, culminating with the Holocaust. It is truly amazing that after each disaster, God’s people renewed itself, scaling new heights of achievement.