God, to whom all pre-modern and even many modern Jews ascribed not only the universe but their own souls and survival, appears nowhere in the official language of the Declaration save for a delightfully oblique reference to The Rock of Israel (a venerable liturgical phrase taken from 2 Samuel 23:3). This near-total omission of the Creator was not lost on the religious signatories, one of whom, Rabbi Judah Leib Maimon, a significant scholar as well as head of the Religious Zionist Mizrachi Party (flown in by Ben-Gurion for the signing from Jerusalem, then under siege), appended to his signature a squiggly three Hebrew characters, b’h, a traditional acronym for be’ezrat Ha-shem, “by the grace of God.”
Much of Israel’s recent history is the gradual movement of Rabbi Maimon’s squiggle — and of other historical squiggles — from the margins of the founding Document, and the ethos it meant to enshrine, to the center.
Yehudah Mirsky, “What Is A Nation State For?”, Marginalia (11 March 2015) [http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/nation-state-yehudah-mirsky/]