When the students of the great R' Yehuda Leib Ashlag (1884-1954), known as the Baal HaSulam, informed him of the official proclamation establishing the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, he made several powerful remarks.
Among them was that had the state not been established, many more Jews in the Diaspora would have faced assimilation (as bad as it is today, it would have been worse)—to the point that more Jewish people would have been lost than even those destroyed by Hitler.
R' Yisroel Reisman echoed this when he said: More than what the State of Israel has done for religious Jews, its impact on secular Jews has been even greater. Had many of those Jews remained in the Diaspora—particularly in places like the United States—a large number might have assimilated entirely. Israel provided them with a connection to their Jewish roots that may otherwise have been lost.
About R' Yehuda Leib Ashlag
As a young man, R' Yehuda Leib served as rabbi of a Warsaw congregation. However, after making the decision to devote himself to learning Kabbalah, he gave up his position, withdrew from worldly pursuits, and lived in abject poverty. He was so poor that his commentaries were written on scraps of paper. In 1922, R' Yehuda Leib settled in Yerushalayim, where he and his family lived near the Kosel. A group of young students listened to his profound Kabalistic expositions on the Zohar and teachings of the Arizal, as set forth in Eitz Chaim. However, his extreme poverty forced him to accept a rabbinic position in Givat Shaul, where he established a Beis Midrash and kollel. The years 1926-1928 he spent in London. During his time there he wrote a commentary on the Arizal, which he printed in 1927. Throughout his stay in London, the Baal HaSulam conducted extensive correspondence with his students in Eretz Yisrael, which were assembled in 1985 in a sefer titled Igros Kodesh. At the end of his life, he lived in Bnei Brak and Tel Aviv. It was there that he completed his magnum opus HaSulam (The Ladder), a twenty-one-volume interpretive Hebrew translation of the Zohar (making the obscure Aramaic text accessible) with a comprehensive introduction. In his Introduction (58) he explains the title HaSulam which he named so to show that the purpose of it which is as with every ladder, that if you have an attic full of precious jewels, then all you need is a ladder to gain access.
One remark he said was that the State of Israel would endure until the coming of Moshiach.
