In The Territorial Impe
In The Territorial Imperative, Robert Ardrey argues that a universal, primal instinct encompasses both the animal kingdom and humankind: the compulsion to possess and defend territory. Without territory, “territorial species” cease to exist.
Just one problem, which Ardrey, try as he might, cannot quite wedge into his category: the Jews. For nearly 1,900 years, the Jews had no territory and were subjected to terrible persecutions, yet still flourished as scholars, traders, and even builders of community. Clearly, “territorial imperative” needs to be redefined. For the Torah, territory is something less to be defended than to be sanctified, and something whose importance rises as its size shrinks.
Of all the comments on the Torah, one of the oddest is that of Rashi on the very first verse of Genesis, “In the beginning G-d created . . . ” Rashi wonders: Is the entire book of Genesis unnecessary and, for that matter, the first eleven chapters of Exodus too? Rashi suggests they are pointless because the purpose of the Torah is to lay down the laws of G-d. Since these do not begin until the twelfth chapter of Exodus, everything before that is pointless.
Genesis, irrelevant!
Thus wonders Rashi.
If the question is odd, Rashi’s answer, at first blush, is even odder. The reason G-d must recount the creation of the cosmos is to establish a legal defense for the Jewish right to the Land of Israel. The defense? G-d created the world. Ergo, G-d owns the world. Ergo, G-d may give any part of the world to whomever He wishes. Ergo, G-d’s gift of the Land of Israel to the Jewish nation is above any legal challenge.
In other words: the centrality of the Land of Israel is established by the first comment on the Torah’s first verse by the commentator who is first among equals. There can be no greater symbolism for the centrality of the Land of Israel in the Torah than Rashi’s putative dismissal of the entire Book of Genesis. Beginning with the Torah and moving through the generations of Jewish thinkers, down to the politicians of the Zionist movement, the Land of Israel is virtually synonymous with Judaism. If there is any characteristic that defines the age-old bafflement of the nations for the Jews, it is the Jews’ unbudgeable, stiff-necked, indeed umbilical tie to the Land of Israel. There is no comparable example of a nation exiled from its land for nearly 1,900 years, held together by a vision of return to the land.
The Land of Israel is central because it is holy. Philosophically speaking, the holiness of the land is a conundrum. How can the Infinite pierce the finite, the spiritual suffuse the material, G-d be present in land? Even if G-d, by some mechanism known only to Him, can render soil holy, why only some soil, indeed, only a sliver of the earth, the Land of Israel? Resistant as these questions are, they fix the Torah’s claim for the holiness of Israel.
This is the reverse of the equation of existence with expanse, a major revision of the “territorial imperative.” The Torah’s glorification of land is always the specific sliver of Biblically bound land; then, within this boundary (already tiny), the still smaller patches that circumscribe the holy city; then, within the city, the still smaller space at its center, inside the Temple; ultimately, the one square cubit at the Temple’s center. This concept is clarified with reference to the precursor of the Temple — the Tabernacle of Exodus.
G-d said to Moses, “and let them make Me a sanctuary” (Ex. 25:8), Moses began to wonder, and he said: “The glory of the Holy One, blessed be He, fills the upper worlds and the lower worlds and yet He says: And let them make Me a sanctuary.”
And moreover Moses gazed [into the future] and saw Solomon upon the completion of the building of the Temple . . . saying to the Holy One, blessed be He: “But will G-d truly dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain You; how much less this house that I have built” (1 Kings 8:27). . . .
G-d replied: “I am not of the same opinion as you. But twenty boards in the north and twenty in the south and eight in the west [will suffice for the dimensions of the Tabernacle and My presence therein]. And more than that, I will descend and I will contract My divine presence [so that it may dwell] in one square cubit.”
For Jews, the territorial imperative is not centrifugal, but centripetal. The focus is not on possession, but on contraction; not on land, but on holiness. Not on defense of a distant border but on the center, on Jerusalem, and, within Jerusalem, not on the Temple but on the one square cubit at the Temple’s center, its inner sanctum, the Holy of Holies.
This, then, is the concept of the holiness of the Land of Israel. G-d can pierce the material world and select but a single patch of soil for His presence, which He can then simultaneously contract and intensify, such that the closer the soil lays to the Temple, the holier it is, and the closer to the center of the Temple, the holier still.
The exiled Jews’ yearning for the one square cubit of concentrated holiness at the Temple’s center is, in essence, a yearning not for territory, but for G-d.
The land is central because it is holy. This is not grasped by Robert Ardrey, who cannot explain Jewish survival without territory. This was not grasped by the British in 1901, who offered the fledgling Zionist movement Uganda (if Ardrey were correct, the Zionists would have embraced Uganda, not spurned it). This was not grasped all the way back to the Jewish spies dispatched by Moses to reconnoiter the land after the Exodus. Sensing only the physical attributes of the land — the strength of the native population, the fortifications of the cities (Num. 13:27-29) — the spies’ faith faltered and the nation fruitlessly followed. Because the land’s potential holiness was not decisive for them, G-d barred the nation from Canaan (Num. 14:31-35). Only the generation after the desert sanctified the land.
However, this later sanctification was based on a much earlier reality. The question is, what, precisely, was that reality? This week’s Torah portion reads:
Moreover, I established My covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan, the land of their residence in which they resided (Exodus 6:4).
Rabbi Naphtali Zvi Berlin, the Netziv (1816-1892), observes:
The land was covenanted to the Jewish people not only because it was “the land of milk and honey,” but because it was the land they were used to — it was their place of residence. They had become comfortable there because of the Divine Providence evident there. That is, even before the ancient Hebrews had conquered the land, before they had divided it among the 12 tribes, before they had sanctified it with a central sanctuary of prayer, let alone the actual Holy Temple, the land itself called forth Divine Providence, continual Divine attention.
“This I covenanted to their descendants,” G-d said, so to speak, in Exodus 6:4. “It My desire to watch over them.”
As G-d established the covenant of the holy land with the Jewish people — as He looked forward to the ultimate consequence of their coming liberation from slavery in Egypt — G-d looked to the past. Even as a mere family of 12 sons and one daughter of Jacob, their residence in the holy land fixed their character forever. In the land of Israel G-d found the paradigm of the Jewish future.
Please pardon me if I descend from the sublime to the ridiculous. The weekly, winter rhythm of comfort in the land is the football obsession with home field advantage. O how winning teams vy for it in the NFL playoffs. Why? Comfort in the land — even a mere 100 yards of land — makes a critical difference.
Let me reascend from the ridiculous to the sublime. Jewish law obligates a person to pray in the same seat in the synagogue every time. Why? One’s chosen place of prayer — one’s personal establishment of sanctity in a piece of land one yard square — reinforces focus and concentration in prayer each time.
The paradoxical, ever contracting and intensifying holiness of the land of Israel does not exhaust its sanctity. Following the land’s centripetal logic to its conclusion, the ultimate contraction of the land must be its explosion into universal holiness, for the Messiah will cause its holiness to be acknowledged by all peoples. Bava Batra says that ultimately there will be a thirteenth parcel of land in Israel for the Messiah. This parcel, reaching beyond the natural confines and divisions of the land, both symbolizes and effectuates the universal acknowledgement of God’s presence in Jerusalem, to which the world will turn, neither for possession nor for defense, but for prayer.
I shall bring them to My holy mountain, and I shall gladden them in My house of prayer…for My House will be called a house of prayer for all peoples (Isaiah 57:7).
Copyright © 2013 by the Intermountain Jewish News
