The Zionist movement and the establishment of the State of Israel have placed the Land of Israel at the center of Jewish life, a role it had not held for two millennia. During the 2,000-year Jewish exile, the Land of Israel lived largely in the ancient past and the distant future of the Jewish people’s national redemptive dreams. Eretz Yisrael played a minuscule role in the practical lives of the Jews in exile. Almost no Jew, whether Torah-observant or secular, considered traveling or relocating to the Land of Israel a realistic option.
It wasn’t until the late 1800s, with the advent of the Zionist movement, that Jews even began considering a mass return to the Land of Israel. Due to the tremendous success over the last 100 years, living in Israel has become a reality for millions upon millions of Jews for the first time in over 2,000 years. The question now facing the Jewish world is: What role do Zionism, the State of Israel, and the Land of Israel play in Jewish life going forward?
In a morally objectionable opinion column written by Michael Lesher in 2017, the author calls Israel’s defensive battles against Palestinian terrorists “vulgar.” In the same column, he accuses Torah-observant Zionists of replacing the Torah with Zionism – a particularly grotesque accusation that unjustly casts aspersions on righteous Jews.
Lesher wrote, “If we sleep long enough, we’re going to wake up one day to find, like Rip Van Winkle, that the world has changed around us. That Israel is God; that Torah has been replaced with a Zionist version of Manifest Destiny; and that Israeli businessman and politician Avi Gabbay and his ilk are the high priests of a tradition we once believed formed a delicate bridge between the grand spiritual struggles of our past and the yearnings invested, over centuries of faith and devotion, in a brighter human future.”
While Lesher’s accusations against the Israeli army and Torah-observant Zionists are despicable and unjustified, his words raise the important point that Israel has begun to play an oversized and undeserved role in Jewish life. It has distracted some Jews and their communities from values that should take a higher priority in the lives of Jews today.
This is a dangerous trend that, if left unchecked, can cause great harm to the Jewish community’s ability to take care of itself and pass on traditional values to future generations.
Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik discussed the uniqueness of the Land of Israel by starting with the question, “Why couldn’t God enter into an intimate relationship with Abraham in Mesopotamia and had to guide him into a new land?”
Soloveitchik quoted two early Torah scholars and disagreed with their approach to the uniqueness of the land. “Judah Halevi, in his Kuzari, explains it with the uniqueness of the Land of Israel as an ideal land for the meeting of God by man. He attributes metaphysical qualities to the land and endorses it with a spiritual climate: hayyei neshamot avir artzekh (the air of your land is the breath of life for our souls). Of course, the old myth of the temperate climate, which is ideal for the development of mankind, was exploited by Halevi. Nahmanides, in his commentary to Leviticus, followed in Halevi’s footsteps, as did the mystics. For them, the attribute of kedusha, holiness, ascribed to the Land of Israel is an objective metaphysical quality inherent in the land.”
Soloveitchik continued by explaining his own view on the uniqueness of the Land of Israel. “With all my respect for the Rishonim [leading rabbis of the 11th-15th centuries], I must disagree with such an opinion. I do not believe that it is halachically [according to Jewish law] cogent. Kedusha, under a halachic aspect, is man-made; more accurately, it is a historical category. A soil is sanctified by historical deeds performed by a sacred people, never by any primordial superiority. The halachic term kedushat ha-aretz, the sanctity of the land, denotes the consequence of a human act, either conquest (heroic deeds) or the mere presence of the people in that land (intimacy of man and nature). Kedushah is identical to man’s association with Mother Earth. Nothing should be attributed a priori to dead matter. Objective kedusha smacks of fetishism.”
The objectives of the messianic era
THERE ARE two concerns that the Jewish world should have about the role the land is playing in the Jewish world today. The first is Soloveitchik’s fear of fetishizing Israel by citing fabricated mystic qualities. The second is the misplaced messianism that has overtaken the Torah-observant Zionist world. The Rishonim warned against prioritizing the hastening of the redemption and the messianic era in a person and the Jewish community’s Torah observance.
The objective of a messianic era is to observe the Torah and mitzvot (Torah commandments) better, not to observe the Torah and mitzvot better to hasten the messianic era. As Maimonides wrote, “All Israel, their prophets and their Sages, have yearned for the Messianic age so they can rest from the oppression of the gentile kingdoms who do not allow them to occupy themselves with Torah and mitzvot properly. They will find rest and increase their knowledge in order to merit the world to come. In that era, knowledge, wisdom, and truth will become abundant.”
The Land of Israel – living in it, settling it, and supporting it – are priorities in Torah Judaism for two reasons; the first is the protection of the nation, and the second is the ability to observe the Torah and mitzvot. For national reasons, the land is important because it delivers self-determination and allows the Jews to defend themselves from enemies without reliance on other nations.
The second reason is that our sages have said that a Jew should always live on the land because he or she can observe more mitzvot in Eretz Yisrael than anywhere else. These two benefits of Israel are the healthy roles that the Land of Israel should play in today’s Jewish world.
The writer is a Zionist educator at institutions around the world and recently published his book, Zionism Today.