G-D promised Israel to the Jews what does that mean?
What is the main issue here? ? What does the idea of a promised land mean?
It does not primarily mean what it is almost always taken to mean: a matter of ownership.
Who owns the land of Israel?
The ancient Hebrews and their Jewish descendants?
The Palestinians?
Individual landowners?
Others?
For some, the question is decided or disputed if the Hebrew Bible is invoked. The Bible says that G-d promised the land to the Patriarch Abraham and his Jewish descendants.
Thats what makes it the promised land.
Case closed if you believe in the Bible.
If you dont, you invoke other criteria.
If youre Palestinian, you argue that the length of continuous residence on the land determines ownership. And whos lived there the longest, into modern times? The Palestinians say it is they.
Or, if youre Jewish and secular, you argue that the Jews own the land based on ancient history; or, perhaps, based on the right to a refuge after the Holocaust.
If youre neither Jewish nor Palestinian, who owns the land of Israel? You may come up with other answers. Maybe its neither the Palestinians nor the Jews.
Sorry.
All this misses the main point of the promised land.
Its not a question of ownership.
LAST week in the Torah the story of the spies was laid out. Twelve spies, appointed by Moses, reconnoitered the land of Israel. Their charge was to determine how the Jews could conquer the land that G-d promised them.
Ten of the spies failed.
They came back with an evil report.
They said the ancient Hebrews would not conquer the land.
The spies depressed the slaves freed from Egypt, who then had to wander 40 years in the desert until the slave mentality generation died out.
What was the main issue here?
Not how the princes of Israel failed to have faith that G-d would help them conquer the land.
Nor how the spies missed the signs (for example, taking the land to be destructive, due to the frequent funerals they saw there, instead of understanding that the plague was G-ds way of distracting a potentially suspicious population from Hebrew spies).
Nor how the people, just recently favored with Divine revelation, were taken in by the faithless 10 spies.
These are critical exegetical issues, but not the main issue.
Still less is the main issue ever articulated in the contemporary political debates over settlements, demography, the spoils of war, defensible borders, refugees, terrorism, etc. etc.
The main issue in defining the promised land is this: Only under Jewish rule will this land flourish.
From the year 70 the decimation of the Jewish population in Israel by the Romans until roughly 1881, with the increase of Jewish immigration into Israel, the land lay desolate.
Thats a period of roughly 1,800 years.
Over that long, long period, virtually every imaginable classification of people had the opportunity to make the land bloom: Romans, Byzantines, Christians, Muslims, Ottomans, Arabs and many, many others.
But the land lay desolate.
That is the fundamental meaning of the promised land: It will flourish only under Jewish control.
And it has.
Since, roughly, 1881.
THIS point was articulated by Nachmanides in the Middle Ages, when the land was desolate and the Jewish population could be counted on two hands.
A tiny, powerless Jewish minority meant that the land would be desolate.
Rabbi Abraham I. Kuk (1865-1935), the first chief rabbi of Palestine, put it this way: The land only gives its fruit and rests on its Sabbatical year when Jews inhabit the land. The land will give her fruit, and there I will settle the remnants of the nation (Zechariah 8:12). They are two links in a chain and two sides of the same coin, as Gideon Weitzman paraphrased Rabbi Kuk.
One can argue against this from every imaginable theoretical point of view. One can call it blind, or racist, or imperialistic, or outlandish, or chauvinistic, whatever you want.
But facts are facts.
1,800 years mean something.
For 1,800 years, countless peoples had their opportunity to control the land and to make it blossom.
Not one succeeded.
The Jews have succeeded.
Because this sliver of territory is the promised land promised not just for ownership or conquest or refuge or historical vindication, but for success.
ADDITIONAL proof: During the 30 years that the British ruled Palestine, from the time Allenby conquered Jerusalem from the Turks in 1918 until Israels declaration of independence in 1948, a major issue was Jewish immigration.
The British maintained that it was necessary to curtail Jewish immigration due to what they called the limited economic absorptive capacity of the land of Palestine.
Even though the British, under the Balfour Declaration of 1917, were committed to facilitating a Jewish National Home in Palestine, the British considered themselves constrained by economic realities. Too many Jewish immigrants would undermine the Jewish national enterprise, they said.
Now, in those years, the total population of Palestine, Jewish and Arab, was well under one million people.
But in 2013, the total population of the same territory is over eight million people! The standard of living in this territory is incomparably greater than it was from 1918 to 1948.
In other words, the economic reality was precisely the opposite of the British analysis. They said, when less than one million people were in Palestine, that Jewish immigration needed to be limited because the land could not economically absorb more people.
Dead wrong.
The land now bears more than eight million people and is flourishing on a scale unimaginable then.
That is because more, not fewer, Jews have came to Palestine, and because Jewish control there has increased qualitatively with Israels creation as a Jewish state in 1948.
The promise of the promised land is the prosperity of the land when it is under Jewish control.
THAT is the point the Jewish spies missed: It wasnt the possibility of conquest they were primarily to see, it was the promise of prosperity.
Thats the point the contemporary politicians miss: Jewish control of the land will alone bring success to the Jews who live there and to others who, under Jewish law, are welcome to live there.
The only way success can come to the promised land is to acknowledge that its dependent upon Jewish control of the land.
Promised land is a promise of ownership for the sake of a lofty ideal, in which prosperity and spirituality intertwine.
To affirm the promised land is to vote with the Prophet Zechariah and with Nachmanides.
It is to vote for success.
It is to see the Divine purpose behind and within Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel.
Nearly two millennia bear this out.
This is not a matter of Jewish brains or Jewish business acuity or any other putatively inherent Jewish trait.
It is a matter of Divine promise with two components: the Jewish people and the Jewish land.
When they come together, the land flourishes.
The only way the promise can be attenuated or suspended is the Jewish failure to honor the other aspects of the Biblical promise, such as Jewish ethics and Jewish spirituality. Those, and those alone, can torpedo the promise.
But when, on the land, Jews pursue justice and Torah, the land flourishes, yielding its fruit, its ideas, its prosperity. That is the meaning of the promised land.
Copyright © 2013 by the Intermountain Jewish News
