The Land: The Historical, Theological, Liturgical Significance of Eretz Yisrael
Reuven Hammer
In the month of May, Jews throughout the world gather in synagogues to celebrate the
newest holiday of the Jewish year, Yom HaAtzmaut, Israel Independence Day. Less
than 60 years after the founding of the Jewish State, the first independent Jewish state
to exist in nearly 2000 years, the Hebrew date of 5 Iyar has found its place together
with such holidays as Purim and Hanukkah on the religious calendar of Judaism and
has been given liturgical expression in our prayer books. This fact alone says volumes
about the historical, theological and liturgical significance of Eretz Yisrael.
True, a distinction is to be made between Eretz Yisrael — the Land of Israel, and
Medinat Yisrael— the State of Israel. The State is a secular-political entity which is a
creation brought about by the Zionist Movement through the offices of the United
Nations. It is, nevertheless, the modern embodiment of Jewish sovereignty (even
though not all its citizens are Jews and not all Jews are its citizens) and as such is the
inheritor of the status of the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah and then of the
post-exilic State of Judea. The Land of Israel, on the other hand is a geographic
designation, the exact boarders of which are difficult if not impossible to define since
there are different definitions found in Scripture. It has theological implications in that
it is the land promised by God to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Certain religious obligations exist only within it and it has the status of holiness both
according to Scripture and to Rabbinic Tradition. The Mishnah, for example, speaks
of "ten degrees of holiness," for “The Land of Israel is holier than all other lands”
(Kelim 1:6). Of course the holiest of them all is the Holy of Holies within the Temple
(Kelim 1:9).
There is no holiness to the state as a political entity and therefore theoretically it
would seem that there is no religious significance to the state. Nevertheless in the
perception of most Jews, these distinctions are— to put it mildly —blurred if they
exist at all. Yom HaAtzmaut, after all, celebrates the creation of the State— within the
Land. Thus Moshe Greenberg, one of the most distinguished of Jewish biblical
scholars, writes:
As the sole political entity created by the combined and concentrated efforts of
the Jewish people, the State of Israel is willy-nilly the most salient
achievement of the Jewish people in our time…Jews in Israel and outside it
share, then, the estimate of the state as somehow expressing the essence of the
Jewish people. Jewish identity is inextricably bound up with the state. This is a
new thing in the history of Jews and Judaism…Indeed one may play with the
notion that for the health of Judaism the state is dangerous. 1
Greenberg recognizes at one and the same time that one cannot equate Judaism with
any political entity and yet that the two are today inextricably intertwined.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, surely one of the most important theological figures —Jew
or Christian— of the 20th century, wrote an entire book about the state, Israel: An
Echo of Eternity. The title says it all. He wrote there:
1
“The Task of Masorti Judaism,” in, Zionism and the Conservative Movement, ed. by John S. Ruskay
and David Szonyi (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary, 1990), pp. 137-139.
What is the meaning of the State of Israel? Its sheer being is the message. The
life in the land of Israel today is a rehearsal, a test, a challenge to all of us. Not
living in the land, non participation in the drama, is a source of
embarrassment (p. 224). The ultimate meaning of the State of Israel must be
seen in terms of the vision of the prophets: the redemption of all men. The
religious duty of the Jew is to participate in the process of continuous
redemption, in seeing that justice prevails over power, that awareness of God
penetrates human understanding (p. 225).
Therefore although there is a definite distinction between the two, state and land, and
from now on I will speak only of the land, it is obvious that for the Jewish people
today, the state has a status more important than a mere political entity, and although
the state can be challenged and criticized, since as a human creation it can be wrong,
as were the rulers of the ancient states of Israel and Judah, its existence is nevertheless
crucial to Jews and Judaism.
For many Jews, including many Zionist thinkers, the raison d'etre for the creation of
the state includes the need for a place of refuge, a place to escape anti-Semitism (this
long before the Holocaust). But for some it also includes the need for a place in which
Judaism and Jewish culture would be the majority culture thus strengthening Judaism
and Jewish communities throughout the world. In some cases this also includes a
religious, almost a messianic vision as we see in these quotations from two early
Zionist leaders at the beginning of the 20th century in America:
The rebirth of Israel’s national consciousness, and the revival of Israel’s
religion, or, to use a shorter term, the revival of Judaism are inseparable…The
selection of Israel, the indestructibility of God’s covenant with Israel, the
immortality of Israel as a nation, and the final restoration of Israel to Palestine,
where the nation will live a holy life on holy ground, with all the wide-
reaching consequences of the conversion of humanity and the establishment of
the Kingdom of God on earth— all these are the common ideals and common
ideas that permeate the whole of Jewish literature…History may, and to my
belief, will repeat itself, and Israel will be the chosen instrument of God for
the new and final mission; but then Israel must first effect its own redemption
and live again its own life, and be Israel again, to accomplish its universal
mission. … “Out of Zion shall go forth the law and the word of the Lord from
Jerusalem.”
Solomon Schechter
Palestine is the land of Promise not only to the Jew but to the entire world – the
promise of a higher and better social order.
Upon the gates of the Third Jewish Commonwealth will be inscribed the same
prophetic words which greeted the establishment of the Second Jewish
Commonwealth:
“Not by might, nor by power,
But by My spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts.”
Israel Friedlander
In this approach these thinkers come close to what I believe to be the Biblical view of
the importance of the land, seeing it neither in terms of how it benefits other Jewries
nor as a physical haven for Jews in danger, but in terms of its intrinsic value. The
Torah envisions the creation of the Kingdom of God in the land as a necessary
component of the fulfillment of God's divine plan. This is a utopian, not a utilitarian,
concept in which Jewish sovereignty in the land becomes an end in itself.
To begin with, the story of the book of Genesis is the story of God in search of a
people that will be His people and actualize His will on earth. It begins with the
search for an individual. The first to be chosen is Noah, but his descendants
disappoint and again one person is singled out for the task: Abraham. "I have known
him so that he may command his children and his household after him, and they shall
keep the way of the Lord, to do justice and judgment…" (Genesis 18:19). This is then
passed on through Isaac and his son Jacob, after which all Jacob's progeny become the
bearers of this promise and this task, becoming a people— the children of Israel
(Jacob), the people Israel. The task assigned to that people is reiterated over and over
again in the Torah and is best summarized in the prologue to the Decalogue itself: If
you will obey My voice and keep My covenant, you shall be My particular treasure
from among all the peoples, though all the earth is Mine. And you shall be unto Me a
kingdom of priests and a holy nation (Exodus 19:5-6). The ultimate purpose of this
was enunciated clearly by Isaiah: On that day shall Israel be the third, with Egypt and
Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth. For the Lord of hosts will bless them,
saying, ‘Blessed be My people Egypt, and Assyria the work of My hands, and My
heritage Israel’ (19:24-5).
The land is an integral part of this promise. Without the land they will not be able to
fulfill their task. Indeed the greatest punishment that can be envisioned for the people
is to be driven from the land (Deuteronomy 28:36ff.).The Sages put it as strongly as
possible when they said, "Dwelling in the Land of Israel is equivalent to observing all
of the Torah's commandments" (Sifre Deuteronomy 80).
An analysis of the Torah, Israel's constitution, shows that the narrative of the Torah is
basically the story of how Israel got to the land and what they were to do there. It is
entirely the story of a journey. Take away the chapters that deal with getting to the
land and you would have a very brief book, ending with Genesis 11. According to
Judaism's most authoritative traditional commentator, Rashi, even those chapters were
including only to indicate that, as the Creator of the world, God had the right and the
power to allocate the land of Canaan to whomever He wanted!
The granting of the land is not simply the gift of a place to live. As Amos points out
(9:7), God has taken other nations out of captivity and given them lands. In the case of
Israel, the land is there as a place in which they can live according to the terms of the
covenant and actualize the commands that God gives to them. The grant of the land is,
in fact, conditional, upon following God's ways. The confession made upon the first
fruits (Deuteronomy 26) makes it very clear that the fulfillment of the covenant
occurs when one has the fruit of the land in hand. As Heschel wrote, "To abandon the
land would be to repudiate the Bible" (page 44). The extreme position on this matter
is the rabbinic saying (Sifre Deuteronomy 43) that when exiled "you are to continue to
observe the commandments so that when you return they will not be new to you."
Just as the Torah is unfathomable without the emphasis on the land and its meaning,
so Jewish prayer is incomprehensible without an acknowledgment of the centrality of
the land. Judaism's basic prayer, known in Hebrew as the Amidah, recited at each
service, three times a day, more on holy days, is a prayer for the restoration of life and
sovereignty in the land. In it we recite such phrases as: "return to Your city,
Jerusalem," "sound the great shofar for our freedom," and "gather us together from the
four corners of the earth." At the conclusion of Yom Kippur and the Passover Seder
we recite, "Next year in Jerusalem." At a wedding we break a glass and recite, "If I
forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its cunning…"
The centrality of Israel, then, lies primarily not in providing a safe place for Jews but
in being the focus for the realization of the Torah's ultimate goal, as reiterated by the
prophets and reaffirmed in rabbinic literature: God has found this people and
appointed them His people and they will be able to fully fulfill His will only in the
land, the end result of which will be the establishment of the Sovereignty of God on
earth.
James Carroll, the Catholic author of Constantine’s Sword, recently wrote a column in
the Boston Globe (International Herald Tribune, April 4, 2006) in which he briefly
traced Christianity’s historic attitude toward Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel.
He wrote, “…Christian theology…required the exile of Jews from the Holy Land
precisely as a proof of religious claims.” Augustine, he continues, argued that Jews
must be scattered throughout the world to give witness that Jesus fulfilled the ancient
promises. This evolved into an understanding of exile as punishment for Jewish
rejection of Christian claims. He points out that Pope Pius X replied to Herzl, who
asked for support for Zionism, that “If you come to Palestine and settle your people
there, we will be ready with churches and priests to baptize all of you.” How different
this is from the Church’s recent actions and statements, as demonstrated by the visit
of John Paul II to Jerusalem and the Western Wall. Nevertheless, Carroll concludes
with this warning, “Contempt for Jews and Judaism is ancient. Such impossible
threads weave invisibly through attempts to reckon with Israel’s dilemma, forming a
rope that trips up the well-intentioned and the unaware, even as others use it, as so
often before, to fashion a noose.”
It should be noted that several Christian theologians have written with understanding
about the importance of the land to Judaism. Perhaps no one better than Walter
Brueggemann in The Land:
The land for which Israel yearns and which it remembers is never unclaimed
space but always a place with Yahweh, a place well filled with memories of
life with him and promise from him and vows to him. It is land that provides
the central assurance to Israel of its historicity, that it will be and always must
be concerned with actual rootage in a place which is a repository for
commitment and therefore identity. Biblical faith is surely about the life of a
people with God as has been shown by all the current and recent emphases on
covenant in an historical place. And if God has to do with Israel in a special
way, as he surely does, he has to do with land as an historical place in a
special way. It will no longer do to speak about Yahweh and his people but we
must speak about Yahweh and his people and his land (pp. 5-6).
In the post-Emancipation days of the 1800s, there were attempts by certain Jewish
groups, eager to establish citizenship and equality for Jews in Western Europe, to
reinterpret Judaism in such a way as to eliminate the place of the land within Judaism.
Slogans such as "Berlin is our Jerusalem" were coined. Zion was eliminated from the
prayers. The irony of these misguided reformations is bitter and obvious. The
centrality of the land to Jewish belief has been restored and with it the responsibility
of those who live there, those who govern there, and those who look to it to make
certain that its meaning and its promise are fulfilled. It is vital that Christians
understand and appreciate this as well and see the Return to Zion as a normative and
positive part of Judaism.
In conclusion, let me cite a poem by Judah Halevi, a medieval poet and theologian
(1075-1141), who expressed in many of his writings the feelings of Jews throughout
the ages for the land of Israel. Living in Spain at the height of the Golden Age of
Spanish Jewry, he nevertheless longed for the land:
My heart’s in the east and I languish on the margins of the west. How taste or
savor what I eat?
How fulfil my vows and pledges while Zion
Is shackled to Edom and I am fettered to Arabia?
I’d gladly give up all the luxuries of Spain
If only to see the dust and rubble of the Shrine.
Happy is he who waits
And lives to behold your lights rising as dawn
breaks over him and he sees
your chosen prospering, and thrills
at your joy, when you regain the vigor of youth.
(Translated by Gabriel Levin)
For Judaism, the establishment of an independent Jewish society in the land of Israel
stands at the very core of the message of Scripture. It is both the purpose of the
Exodus and the means of fulfilling the Divine purpose. For the Jew it is the dream that
has never died and the hope that is eternally new.
