Text Study:
The Children of Israel and the Land of Israel
Following are a variety of texts from both the Bible and modern writers concerning the relationship of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel.
The Torah instructs us to let the land rest and create a just society
When you come to the land that I give you, then shall the land keep a Sabbath to God. Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard, and gather in its fruit. But the seventh year shall be a Sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a Sabbath for God: your field you are not to sow, your vineyard you are not to prune... And you shall number seven Sabbaths of years to you, seven times seven years... On the Day of Atonement you shall sound the shofar throughout your land. And you shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants: it shall be a jubilee for you, and you shall return all people to their possessions, and you shall return all people to their families... The land shall not be sold forever: for the land is mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with me.
| -- Leviticus 25:2-4, 8-11, 23. |
Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may live and inherit the land which God
your God gives you.
| -- Deuteronomy 16:20 |
What is the connection between social justice and the ability of the Jewish
people, or any people, to live on its land, generation after generation? What
effect do you think the practice of the sabbatical year and the Jubilee had on
the primarily agricultural Israelite society? What would it mean for modern
industrial society to pause in order to let the soil rest, the air clear, the
waters gather?
Isaiah warns Israel about the consequences of becoming greedy
Woe to those who join house to house, who lay field to field, till there is no room, and you are made to dwell alone in the midst of the land! In my ears said the God of hosts, "Of a truth many houses shall be desolate, great and fair, without inhabitant. For ten acres of vineyard shall yield one bat, and the seed of a chomer shall yield an ephah..."
| -- Isaiah 5:8-10 |
What will happen ecologically if we fill the land up with our houses and
fields, roads and factories? What will happen to other species? And what will be
the spiritual effects on us?
Ezekiel prophesies about a return from exile
Prophesy therefore concerning the land of Israel, and say to the mountains, and to the hills, to the ravines, and to the valleys, --Thus says God God, "...You, 0 mountains of Israel, you shall shoot forth your branches, and yield your fruit to my people of Israel; for they will soon be coming. For, behold, I am for you, and I will turn to you, and you shall be filled and sown... And the desolate land, after lying waste in the sight of every passerby, shall again be filled. And they shall say, 'This land that was blighted is become like the garden of Eden, and the waste and blighted and ruined cities are fortified, and inhabited.' Then the nations that are left around you shall know that I, God, have rebuilt the ruined places, and have replanted the desolate land; I, God, have spoken it, and I will do it."
| -- Ezekiel 36: 6-9, 34-36. |
Honey from Desolation
No grower of bees
would put his
beehives here.
But people
sometimes make honey from desolation
sweeter than anything.
| -- Poet Yehuda Amichai |
According to the Bible, the land flourishes when the people Israel live according to the law, and God makes the land desolate and exiles the people when they violate the law. How might this vision of the relationship between the Jewish people and the land of Israel have informed the early Zionist thinkers and pioneers? (See the two following texts as examples)
A Zionist vision of a new Jewish culture "reinhabiting" the land of Israel
And on that day, your construction will no longer be, son of man, that which destroys the majesty of the world's own construction, and the beauty of your building a blemish in the sphere of cosmic beauty... And you shall learn Torah from the mouth of nature, the Torah of building and creating and you shall learn to do as nature does in everything you build and in everything you create. And so in all your ways and in all your life you will learn to be a partner in creation.
| -- Aaron David Gordon, 1910. |
This early labor-Zionist vision is similar to contemporary
bioregionalism--urging that the Jewish people "reinhabit" the land of
Israel and develop a culture in harmony with the land. What might "Torah
from the mouth of nature" instruct us to do today?
Israel's first Prime Minister calls for "fructifying the waste places"
The tasks that lie ahead will require pioneering efforts the likes of which we have never known, for we must conquer and fructify the waste places (in the mountains of Galilee, the plains of the Negev, the valley of the Jordan, the sand dunes of the seashore, and the mountains of Judea) and we must prepare the way for new immigrants.
| -- David Ben Gurion, 1944 who became the State of Israel's first prime minister. |
Why did Ben Gurion call uninhabited areas "waste places"? Did he
distinguish between those areas that human-caused degradation had made into
waste-places from the arid or mountain ecosystems that are not conducive to
agriculture?
By Mark X. Jacobs. Jeremy Bernstein of the Heschel Center for
Environmental Learning and Leadership in Israel provided suggestions for Zionist
texts.
This article also belongs to the following subjects:
Judaism
>
Jewish Texts
Judaism
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Judaism and the Environment
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