The Man Who Wrote the Future

More than a hundred years ago, in the summer of 1897, a man with a big black beard sat in a hotel room in Switzerland and wrote something impossible in his diary.

He wrote that he had just started a country.

He didn't have an army. He didn't have any land. He didn't even have very much money. But he wrote that maybe in five years — and certainly in fifty — the whole world would see it.

Keep that number in your head: fifty years. This is a true story, and the number matters.

The man's name was Theodor Herzl.

Theodor was born in 1860 in Budapest, a city on the great Danube River. He loved books, ideas, and especially writing. When he grew up, he became a writer for a famous newspaper, and his job took him across Europe — first to Vienna, then to Paris.

But wherever he went, Herzl noticed something that made his heart hurt. Jewish families, like his own, were often treated unfairly. In Paris, he watched a Jewish soldier get blamed for something he did not do — just because he was Jewish. In other places it was even worse. Jewish children were told: you don't belong here.

So Herzl asked himself a question. It was a very old question and a brand-new question at the same time:

What if the Jewish people had a home of their own again — in the land of Israel, where their story began?

When Herzl shared his idea, plenty of people laughed. Some called him a dreamer. He wrote his idea in a little book called The Jewish State, and still, many people shook their heads.

But Herzl knew a secret: a dream that gets written down starts to become a plan.

So in August 1897, he invited Jewish people from all over the world to the city of Basel, Switzerland. About two hundred came, from many different countries. Herzl asked everyone to dress in their finest, fanciest clothes. Why? Because he wanted every person in that hall to feel it in their bones: this is not just a meeting. This is the beginning of something enormous. That gathering was called the First Zionist Congress.

And that is the night Herzl went back to his hotel room, opened his diary, and wrote that in Basel he had founded the Jewish State — and that in five years, or certainly in fifty, everyone would see it.

Then he got to work. Herzl rode trains and ships all over the world to ask for help — he met an emperor, a sultan, a king, even the Pope. He worked so hard, for so long, that his heart grew weak. In 1904, Herzl died. He was only forty-four years old. He never got to see the country he dreamed of.

But remember the number.

Fifty years after Basel — almost exactly — in 1947, countries from all around the world voted at the United Nations to say yes to a Jewish state. A few months later, in 1948, the State of Israel was born. And in the hall where its independence was declared, one picture hung on the wall, watching over everything: a man with a big black beard.

Israel kept a promise to that man. Herzl had asked, in his will, to be brought to the Jewish land when there finally was one. In 1949, he was carried to Jerusalem and buried on a beautiful mountain that now carries his name: Mount Herzl.

Herzl once wrote words that children in Israel still say today:

"If you will it, it is no dream."

Every big thing in the world — every country, every invention, every family's journey — began as somebody's dream. Which means somebody in your family had big dreams too. And it means one more thing: the dream you have today might be the beginning of a story people tell in a hundred years.