Part X
The Jews believe the land was reserved for them at creation because of its spiritual character, asserted philosopher Eliezer Schweid. A unique sanctity permeates the land. making living there intrinsically of the uppermost importance, overshadowing all the other biblical commandments. “The Jew must live among his sovereign people in order to fulfill the commandments—this is Maimonides’ (Rambam’s) basic assumption, and the sanctity of the land is founded on it….” Anyone who lives in the land is certain to have a place in the world to come, while an individual who leaves permanently “is like a man who has no God.” It is a land that is “unique and irreplaceable,” and cannot be exchanged for any other.
The Rambam said the land became sanctified when Jews inhabited it. “It is the relationship bound up with the national possession of the land based on the Torah” observed Schweid, “that sanctified it to the people of Israel and none other.” Joshua’s conquest sanctified the land, but when the Jews were forced into exile in Babylon, this sanctity ended. It was restored only when the Jews who returned to the Land of Judah in 538 BCE.
“For the Jews and for them alone, this was the one and only Homeland, the only conceivable place where they could find liberation and independence, the land toward which their minds and hearts had been uplifted for a score of centuries and where their roots had clung in spite of all adversity…. It was the homeland with which an indestructible bond of national, physical, religious, and spiritual character had been preserved, and where the Jews had in essence remained—and were now once more in fact—a major element of the population,” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel explained.
The phrase Next Year in Jerusalem “has been the umbilical cord which has tied the Jews of the world to the land of Israel for two thousand years,” notes Meyer Weisgal, who served as the president of the Weizmann Institute of Science and as the founding president of Beit Hatfutsot (the Diaspora Museum).
Wherever Jews lived, observes Heschel, they did not publicly challenge the occupation of the land by the empires of the East and West. They did so in their homes, sanctuaries, books and prayers. Religious rituals were instituted to remember the destruction of the Temple and the subsequent exile. During times of joy and sorrow, Zion is always part of a Jew’s thoughts and liturgy. At least three times a day, observant Jews pray for the redemption of Zion and Jerusalem and for her well-being. (Ibid. 55, 61-67).When comforting a Jew on the loss of a loved one, we say, “May God comfort you (amongst) the other mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.”
Throughout Jewish history, he added, Jews have recited Psalm 137: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest Joys.” The verse is sung at the end of Jewish weddings. The words of Jeremiah (33:10-11), form a prayer sung at weddings to ask God to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem and restore joy and happiness to the streets of Jerusalem: “Yet again there shall be heard … in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem. The voice of joy and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride.”
Israel’s national anthem, written in 1886 by Naphtali Herz Imber, makes this eternal connection point quite clear: “As long as the Jewish spirit is yearning deep in the heart, With eyes turned toward the East, looking toward Zion, Then our hope—the two-thousand-year-old hope—will not be lost: To be a free people in our land, The land of Zion and Jerusalem.”
Jewish religious ritual and liturgy and biblical, medieval and modern literature is pervaded with longing for Zion. Agricultural and meteorological conditions in Israel are also a fundamental part of this identification. During January, when the cities in the Northeast might be covered with snow, Jewish children plant saplings because in Israel, it is the New Year of the Trees, when the almonds blossom for the first time. Even though the streets might be soaked from torrential rains in October, Jews pray that it should rain in Israel. The harvest has ended and the fields are parched. No other space on earth arouses such fervor and passion among the Jews, and infinite sacrifice to bring back the land to life.
When the Jews began to rebuild the land, they found the Valley of Jezreel mired in malaria. Today it is the agricultural heartland of the country. Reclamation cost the lives of hundreds of Jewish pioneers. No one forced them to engage in this dangerous work.
British Royal Commission of Inquiry Acknowledges Eternal Bond
The eternal bond between the Jews and the Land of Israel was eloquently described in the report by the British Royal Commission of Inquiry (Peel Commission), led by Lord Peel, who was appointed in 1936 to investigate the causes of unrest in Mandatory Palestine. The Peel Commission report of 1937 concluded:
While the Jews had thus been dispersed over the world, they had never forgotten Palestine. If Christians have become familiar through the Bible with the physiognomy of the country and its place-names and events that happened more than two thousand years ago, the link which binds the Jews to Palestine and its past history is to them far closer and more intimate. Judaism and its rituals are rooted in those memories. Among countless illustrations it is enough to cite the fact that Jews, wherever they may be, still pray for rain at the season it is needed in Palestine. And the same devotion to the Land of Israel, Eretz Israel, the same sense of exile from it, permeates Jewish secular thought. Some of the finest Hebrew poetry written in the Diaspora has been inspired, like the Psalms of the Captivity, by the longing to return to Zion.
The report acknowledged that this connection was not only “spiritual or intellectual,” because Jews were living in Palestine “always or almost always” since the demise of the Jewish State. During the Arab reign, there were a considerable number of Jewish communities in the major cities. Even though small in number, the Jews in Eastern Europe considered that they were being represented by this “remnant of their race who were keeping a foothold in the land against the day of the coming of the Messiah.”
The Peel Commission also found that the Jews had created an oasis of cultural and literary activity and scientific achievement in comparison to the Palestinian Arabs. “With every year that passes,” the commission concluded, “the contrast between this intensely democratic and highly organized modern community and the old-fashioned Arab world around it grows sharper, and in nothing, perhaps, more markedly than on its cultural side. The literary output of the National Home is out of all proportion to its size. The Hebrew Press has expanded to four daily and ten weekly papers. Two periodicals are exclusively concerned with literature and one with dramatic art. But perhaps the most striking aspect of the culture of the National Home is its love of music. It was while we were in Palestine, as it happened, that Signor Toscanini conducted the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, composed of some 70 Palestinian Jews, in six concerts…. On each occasion every seat was occupied, and it is noteworthy that one concert was reserved for some 3,000 workpeople at very low rates and that another 3,000 attended the Orchestra’s final rehearsal. All in all, the cultural achievement of this little community of 400,000 people is one of the most remarkable features of the National Home.”
To be sure, “There is Arab literature, of course, and Arab music,” the Commission added, “but the culture of Arab Palestine is the monopoly of the intelligentsia and, born as it is of Asia, it has little kinship with that of the National Home, which, though it is linked with ancient Jewish tradition, is predominantly a culture of the West. Nowhere, indeed, is the gulf between the races more obvious. Anyone who attended the Toscanini Concerts at Jerusalem might have imagined, if he closed his eyes, that he was in Paris, London, or New York. Yet, almost within earshot was the Old City, the Haram-esh-Sharif, and the headquarters of the Arab Higher Committee. It is the same with science. The Daniel Sieff Research Institute at Rehovot [later named the Weizmann Institute for Science] is equipped with the most delicate modern instruments; the experiments conducted there are watched by chemists all over the world: yet from its windows can be seen the hills inhabited by a backward peasantry who regard it only as the demonstration of a power they hate and fear and who would like, no doubt, when their blood is up, to destroy it.”
Dr. Alex Grobman, a Hebrew University-trained historian, is senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society and a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.
