Dvar Torah on Parshat Lech-Lecha

Today, here in Israel, we are marking the 11th anniversary of Yitzchak Rabin's assassination. The radio is playing sad songs - I've already heard some Leonard Cohen and George Harrison, two certified depressives - the air waves are full of left-wingers and right-wingers slugging it out over who is to blame, have the necessary lessons been learned and can it happen again, and there are commemorative ceremonies all over. Since the assassination, the gap between the religious and secular communities here is seen to have grown (I happen to be an optimist about this issue, and believe that the media and the professional peace-makers tend to overstate the problem, but a problem certainly does exist), and the two communities may well be moving farther and farther apart. This negative process was exacerbated by the pull-out from Gaza a little over a year ago; some in the religious community have taken it very hard indeed, and are adopting a very aggressive and vocal anti-government, anti-state position, with some even calling on religious Zionists to not serve in the army - a radical step indeed for a community for whom military service has traditionally been seen as a major mitzvah. The basic issue behind all of these tensions is, of course, the argument over the status of the occupied territories: Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and the Golan. The far right religious Zionists have developed a radical attachment to the land, and seem to see everything through that lens - the land of Israel, and our control of it, has taken absolute center stage in their religious and national world view. The left, on the other hand, tend to see the Jewish presence in those areas - the 'occupation' - as the root of all evil, and the only thing standing in the way of peace and security. In this week's parsha, Lech Lecha, the Land of Israel figures prominently, for the first time in the Torah, and I would like to take a look at it in order to see if we can learn something about this contemporary conflict. As our parsha begins, Abraham is commanded by God to leave his home and go to the Land of Canaan, which, he is told a few verses later, will be given to his descendants as a homeland. Immediately afterwards, we are told that "...there was a famine in the land, and Abraham went down to dwell in Egypt, for the famine was heavy in the land." Attitudes towards Abraham's decision to leave the land of Canaan, which only five minutes earlier had been designated as the promised land, because of a famine, are divided. Rashi (11th century), the Radak (12th-13th century), and others, praise him. "This is one of the tests in which God tested our father Abraham", the Radak posits, "and he passed them all, and did not question God...but, rather, he accepted it all with love, and did not question the ways of God." Apparently, according to this way of thinking, Abraham passed the test by calmly accepting that he had to leave Israel, even though God had just brought him there and promised it to him and his descendants, without getting upset at this apparent lapse in God's care and concern for him. Nachmanides, also known as the Ramban, on the other hand, sees Abraham's decision to go to Egypt very differently: "...his leaving the Land about which he was originally commanded because of a famine was a sin which he committed, for God could have, in a famine, saved him from death, and it was for this action that his descendants were condemned to be exiled in Egypt, at the hands of Pharaoh; in the place where the judgment is meted out, there was the evil and the sin." Clearly, Nachmanides thinks that Abraham failed the test: he was supposed to remain in Israel, sit tight in the promised land, and trust in God, rather than abandon the land for food in Egypt. This lapse, he adds, was punished, in a bit of poetic justice, by the Jews being forced into the Egyptian exile. It seems to me that in the Ramban's position we see a conceptual antecedent to much of what contemporary right wing religious Zionists are saying. The commandment to live in the Land of Israel is seen as central to one's Jewish identity, one's very existence as a Jew. Living in Israel is such a basic value that it trumps any normal decision-making process - like going where the food is - and allows me, in fact demands of me, to expect miracles from God which will guarantee my continued presence there; anything less, any willingness to compromise on my presence in the Land, is called a sin by Nachmanides. This position is echoed today by an absolutist commitment to the Land of Israel as the central Jewish value, one that is so essential to our identity as Jews that any other considerations - peace, good relations with our non-Jewish neighbors as well as our fellow Jews - are insignificant by comparison. Any attempt to place other values before the value of settling the land is seen as treason. If you deny the core Jewish value, our homeland, then you are denying the essence of Judaism. Homeland, every inch of homeland, is the essential Jewish fact. The difference, by the way, between this position and that of A.B. Yehoshua is only in the "every inch" part. Other than that, they are in complete agreement that Jewish identity is essentially national, and, as such, is bound up, inexorably and inextricably, in a national home. [I realize that the right wing also uses security concerns - very real ones, I believe - in their argument against giving away land; I am purposely not relating to these, as they are beyond the scope of this piece. More to the point, I believe that these concerns are emotionally and psychologically not really what is at play in most religious-Zionist discussion of the status of the land of Israel.] Rashi and the Radak, on the other hand, see the land of Israel, and one's relationship to it, as simply one more element in the texture of one's Jewish life: it is, if everything works out, where Jews live, and not much more than that. If it becomes difficult to live there, we leave. Although this may fly in the face of God's master plan, and His promises to us, that does not upset any essential Jewish apple carts. We still know what takes priority: maintaining faith, and living a Jewish life, based on that faith (and not on the existence of a physical nation state), in or out of Israel, which is what Abraham successfully did by shrugging his shoulders and moving to Egypt. The way Rashi and the Radak understand Abraham's test, he can pass only if he rejects Israel as being absolutely essential to Jewish life, and embraces, instead, the notion that Jewish life is about faith in God and the survival of the Jewish people, wherever that may take place. Sticking stubbornly to the Land would constitute a failure. The left wing in Israel echo this approach, by insisting that hanging on to all of Israel may be a value, but it is one which is trumped by other values: the search for peace, the need for normalcy, notions of fairness, and Jewish demographic survival. They are therefore willing to give up large chunks of the land for these other values, which, to them, are also of central importance to us as Jews and human beings. It is worth noting, however, that the vast majority of Israelis are sufficiently Nachmanidean to not want to give up all of the land for these values, even though that has meant, and may well continue to mean, living with difficulties which are certainly as challenging as a famine. So, it turns out that both of these groups, the secular left and the religious right (a generalization, but true as far as it goes), so at odds with each other, so angry at each other - especially today, on the anniversary of the assassination of the hero of one group by a representative of the other group - are really simply acting out a machloket rishonim, an argument between medieval Jewish sages, echoing and re-framing the words of Rashi and the Radak on the one hand, and Nachmanides on the other. One would like to hope that knowing this would perhaps bring down the volume, and convince the two camps to show a little more respect. One would like to hope. Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Shimon Felix