Chaye Sarah Love
of the Land of Israel -Ahuzat Kever
One of
my teachers of Jewish history pointed out something very telling about the
history of Jewish settlements.
What
was the one act which defined the establishment of a new Jewish community? Was
it building a synagogue? Was it a school? No.
The one
thing that defined the establishment of a living Jewish community-was a
cemetery.
Afterall,
a minyan could be held in anyone’s house, and so could a school. But , when
someone died, he or she had to be buried in a plot of land designated for a
Jewish cemetery.
Thus,
today’s Torah portion opens up, as we call it, “ Chayei Sarah”- the life of Sarah,
by which we mean, the death of Sarah. Abraham must now acquire “ achuzat kever” , a piece of land, where he can place
the remains of his beloved Sarah. Thus, we learn, in the Torah reading of his
negotiations and his purchase of “ maarat hamachpelah”, The double Cave or Cave
of Machpelah.
It is at this moment, in buying the land for 400 shekel,
that Abraham gains a legal and lawful foothold in what was Eretz Canaan, the
Land of Canaan, and will , in the future be called “ Eretz Yisarel”, the Land of Israel.
Note
that from the first chapters about Abraham, he is promised that this land will
be his and his children’s. Nevertheless, he does not take a foothold by force,
but,at this moment, makes his presence in the land permanent, by acquiring a
cemetery for his family. It is from this moment on, in history, that we, as
Jews, can say we have a claim to the land of Israel.
We ask
the question-How strong is Jewish affection for Israel?
The
historic love of the land of Israel by the people of the land of Israel is
unique in the annals of human history.
A my great-great grandfather displayed that love when in 1881, at the age
of 81, he gave each one of his sons a set of leather bound Talmud, and he and
my great-great grandmother packed up their key belongings, left the Shtetl of
Dolina in Galicia and set off to Israel, to the city of Tsfat, Safed, the city
of mystics.
At the
exact same time, in a different civilization, empire, culture, my wife's great-great
grandfather abandoned his home city of Sana, Yemen, and made his way to
Jerusalem. The house, of Jerusalem stone, which he built then, still stands.
Both,
from different corners of the earth and different cultures, were involved in
Zionism before there was a Zionism , a
year before the first modern Zionist movement, Bilu, and 16 years before the
First Zionist Congress.
I mention this in particular to help us keep
in mind that Zion is older than Zionism.
Someone
once asked me “Just how deep is our connection to the land of Israel over these
centuries.”
After all, we
speak of two thousand years of exile. Even the Zionist hymn, the Hatikvah
speaks of “ tikvatenu bat shnot
aloayim”-Our two-thousand year old hope”.
Early church
doctrine, from ancient to modern times, has always dated our expulsion from the
land of Israel with the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70. Arab
propaganda against Israel has always claimed that we Jews are Johnny come
lately to the land, having arrived, for the most part since from the 1917, the
Day of Infamy for Palestinians, the day of the Balfour declaration. In fact, in
their claim, there never was a Temple on the Temple Mount( even though their
tradition contradict that claim).
We have fallen victim to our competition's advertising.
So what
have Jews been doing about and with the
land of Israel for the past two thousand years, besides dreaming?
Obviously,
we have done an awful lot of praying. We have been praying for our crops in the
land of Israel, even while we sat in Poland, Persia, Peking, Pakistan or
Pategonia--whether we were farmers, cattle ranchers, craftsmen, money-lenders,
or physicians. We may not have known what a fresh blade of wheat looked like in
the ghetto of Venice or the meilah of Casablanca--but we prayed for rain in its
time from Shmini Atzeret till the second day of Pesah, and we counted the Omer,
the days of the wheat harvest till Shavuot.
We
constantly declared in our prayers "Ve techezena"-May our eyes
witness your Return unto Zion in mercy " or "tolicheynu kommemiut leartzenu”-Bring
us, upright, proudly, to our land". Every wedding included a reminder of
the land and Temple long lost.
There
was also the longing for the land, in the form of poetry, such as that of Rabbi
Judah Halevy--Libi bamizrach, veani besof maarav yoshev
"My
heart is in the east, and I in the uttermost west--how can I find savor in
food? How shall it be sweet to me?"
Could
such longing for the land, implanted from the mother's milk, fail to have its
impact?
But
dreams alone are not enough, nor are prayers. I am sure that there is many an
American Indian who dreams of Manhattan Island once again. Our dreams,alone,
are not sufficient to justify our claim over and against others living in the
land of Israel. Rather, there is the fact of the constant Jewish settlement of
the land of Israel.
First
and above all else, we did not disappear from the land of Israel with the fall
of Jerusalem in the year 70, quite contrary to the teachings of the Christian
Church and Arab propagandists.
It is
true, that with the fall of the Temple in the war with Rome, we lost our
sovereignty, we lost our Temple, and we were nearly destroyed, but we still did
not vanish. Within a few years, we had established academies and new
communities, and within 50 years, we were numerous enough again, to threaten
the Roman empire.
In the land of Israel, we ran our own affairs,
had a Rabbi as official Prince, recognized by Rome, we built ornate synagogues,
we edited the Mishnah , the ground book of Jewish law, we arranged the siddur, our order of
prayer, we created our Midrash, the
basis of Jewish thought, and we debated the Palestinian Talmud. We formulated our edition of the Torah and the Bible--with all the vowel
sounds and musical cantillation that have become universal standards for Jews
today. All this in the land of Israel.
All
this creativity took place in a land and
time, in which we were led to believe--we weren't there.
It was
only the repeated wars of conquest--first Persian, then Byzantine, then the
Arab conquest and finally the Crusades that finally robbed the land of Israel
of its Jews.
Yet,
Jews never truly left-- as soon as times permitted, Jews made their way back to
the land of Israel. Saladin, the Moslem hero, welcomed Jews back to settle with
open arms. Rabbis and scholars made their way back to pray at the base of the
Western Wall, yet others came back to work and live their.
When in
1492, Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue, a great number of Jews form Spain and
Portugal made their way to the land of Israel. We were welcomed with open arms
by the Turkish Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, who saw in us excellent
resources for his expanded empire.
Once
again, it was the land of Israel which was home for Jewish creativity--our
basis of Jewish law and custom--the Shulkhan Aruch ,was created in Eretz
Yisrael. Our Jewish dreams and fantasies, the kabbalah, received their shape in
the mysticism of Safed.
The
Jewish return to the land of Israel never ceased. In the 1700's , an entire
Hasidic community moved en masse, to the land of Israel. Never was the land of
Israel empty of the people Israel--there is, till today, one family, in the
village of Pekiin, in the Galilee, that have never left the land for these past
2000 years.
So
much, though for past history. What of today?
Obviously,
we know , that it is equally true , that Jews have existed in Diaspora, in
dispersal, outside the land of Israel, even while the first Temple still stood.
We are, by inclination, a people , as Haman would describe us, “mefuzar
umeforad bechol haamim”--a people
scattered and dispersed among all the peoples. That is our temperament-- yet,
for all the dispersal, the heart, in Rabbi Yehudah Halevy's words, was always
there.
So from
Abraham’s purchase of a plot of ground to bury his wife Sarah to our day, there
is an ongoing connection to the land of Israel.
In a
few weeks, it will have been 75 years since Kristallnacht, The Night of Broken
Glass, which is considered the start of the Holocaust. Just ten years later, after the devastation of European
Jewry , the State of Israel was born. That is the difference in time from desperation
to rebirth. Look at how our Jewish world has changed with the return to Israel.
Let us now ever and always bind our well being and our future with that of the
people of Israel, through our words, and through our deeds.
No comments:
Post a Comment