Consider Avraham as a very old man, a widower, following the death of his beloved wife.
Had Avraham been faithful to his covenant with God? Without a doubt. He left his birthplace, his homeland, and his father’s home to follow God to an unknown land. According to the rabbis, he endured ten trials, to test his faith and devotion and he passed each one of those trials and tests.
Did God fulfill His side of the bargain?
Let’s review what Avraham was promised when God first told him to journey to Canaan: “I will make you into a great nation, and I shall bless you, and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing.”
Does that describe Avraham’s reality? He had just buried his beloved wife. And then Avraham is left to sit alone in his tent. How could he have not felt disappointment? He had been promised to be the father of a great nation. Where is his nation? Yishmael has been banished and will not be the heir of Avraham’s spiritual legacy. And Yitzchak is without children of his own and is unmarried. Avraham’s great nation consists of himself and his son Yitzchak.
Avraham was promised the land of Canaan. But what was he left with? Avraham has to negotiate with the local tribes to secure his access to land and water. And he cannot even bury his wife without paying a small fortune to Ephron, the lucky seller of the cave.
And yet, despite this pessimistic perspective, The Torah tells us that God “blessed Avraham with everything.” How could a man with no land and a two person family be considered blessed?
The wave of terror and violence in Israel is somehow connected to Muslim paranoia concerning imagined Israeli plots to replace the Al Aksa Mosque and Dome of the Rock with the Third Beit HaMikdash and more moderate fears that Israel plans on modifying the status quo on that site which bans non-Muslim prayer form Har HaBayit. Trying to make sense of this dynamic, the Israeli scholar and public intellectual Avi Sagi published an article, originally in the newspaper Ha’aretz that has been subsequently translated into English and published in other locations (“Keeping God on the Temple Mount” available here: http://hartman.org.il/Blogs_View.asp? Article_Id=1617&Cat_Id=275&Cat_Type=Blogs).
Sagi argues that the new Israeli activism and agitation for a restoration of Jewish prayer on Har HaBayit comes from a conflation and confusion of the language of sovereignty and the language of sanctity. Sagi writes:
Sovereignty conveys a state’s control over territory, and is realized through the state’s ability to wield power and, in accordance with its decisions, enact laws that apply to a specific geographic location… Holiness is geared to the shaping of a consciousness that recognizes God as the sole sovereign of human existence, whose dominion is expressed in the divine ability to limit human autonomy…The holier the space, the greater the restrictions on human sovereignty, and the Temple Mount is the space where human beings cannot impose any dimension of sovereignty.
Is Sagi correct?
Not exactly. Sanctity, holiness, in Judaism, as it applies to land, is directly connected to sovereignty.
The Mishnah teaches that the territory conquered by Joshua became sanctified with Kedushat Eretz Yisrael and all of the restrictions and special mitzvot of the Land of Israel applied to that territory. However, since that land became Jewish as a result of conquest, when the Jewish people were dispossessed of that land, the sanctity, its holiness vanished.
Later, a much smaller area of territory was settled by the Jews who returned from the Babylonian captivity in the time of Ezra and Nechemiah. That land became Jewish through Hazakah – living in a place without any neighbors objecting to one’s presence demonstrates ownership. The territory settled by the Jews who came from Bavel is endowed with Kedushat Eretz Yisrael forever. Since it was not dependent on conquest, it cannot be undone by our dispossession of the land.
So on a very basic level, Sagi is incorrect in claiming that sanctity, holiness of land in Judaism, is entirely separate from sovereignty. It is precisely Jewish sovereignty, the presence of Jews, that turns a piece of territory into Eretz Yisrael with the ensuing status.
But, Sagi is still correct about a broader point. One cannot impose a modern discourse of political sovereignty onto a classic halakhic discussion in a facile, sloppy, and automatic way. Sovereignty in the context of modern political Zionism is different from a classic Jewish attachment to Eretz Yisrael.
Zionism is both ultra-radical and ultra-conservative at the very same time. Zionism is a return to our roots as a people in a tangible and literal way. And it is also a dramatic and radical rapture with Jewish history, fundamentally transforming and secularizing the nature and meaning of Jewish history itself.
Some of us saw this on Shabbat afternoons earlier this fall as we studied a magnificent halakhic essay that written by Rabbi Eitam Henkin who was murdered with his wife on Hol HaMo’ed Sukkot. This essay, a survey and analysis of the nature of the mitzvah to live in the Land of Israel among the various rishonim and acharonim, medieval and modern halakhic scholars, explored, among other topics, whether or not the mitzvah of yishuv Eretz Yisrael, living in the Land of Israel could be considered a distinct mitzvah, or only part of a broader mitzvah that includes conquest of the Land of Israel under Jewish sovereignty.
Indeed, we only have to look to anti-Zionist Satmar Hassidim and post-Zionist hilltop youth to see that a devotion to the mitzvah of living in Israel can be quite strong even without any allegiance to the state. And the opposite is true as well. It is possible for the state to think about its sovereignty over territory and how that should be maintained and demonstrated separate from Jewish religious attachment to mekom hamikdash, the site of the Temple on Har HaBayit.
Halakhah notes conquest and hazakah as two methods of acquiring territory and two methods by which Eretz Yisrael was sanctified. But there is a third method as well -purchase. David purchased the site upon which his son Shlomo would build the Temple and, in our parasha, Avraham purchases a burial plot for Sarah. These locations may have even elevated sanctity because purchase requires gemirat daat, full intention and consent by both sides of the deal.
When Avraham first asks for a burial plot for Sarah, he is told that he can take the field for free. Avraham is a respected man and Efron is happy to let Avraham bury Sarah in his field. But Avraham doesn’t accept the field as a gift. He wants more. He asks for an “achuzah.” It seems that he doesn’t just want a place to bury Sarah but he wants sovereignty. He wants to begin the process of making Eretz Yisrael the sacred land of the Jewish people. Decades after Lekh Lekha, decades after his aliyah, Avraham starts the process of actually acquiring and sanctifying Eretz Yisrael and he does it through purchase.
Rashi points out that the after the purchase of the field, the Torah says the field is established, upheld, lifted up “VaYakam”
.ויקם שדה עפרון. תקומה היתה לה שיצאה מיד הדיוט ליד מלך
“The field was established since it was transferred from the hands of a civilian to the hands of a king.”
Avraham was a king. He only owned one burial plot (like in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn…) but the process had begun by which his descendants would inhabit the land and that makes Avraham into a king.
And this is why Avraham was blessed in his old age. He only owned a tiny portion of land but he understood that a process had been set in motion that would result in his descendants acquiring all of the land God had promised. He only had one child who would continue the covenantal mission after him and, at this point in the story, that child had no children of his won and was not even married, but Avraham understood that the potential was already in place to ensure the future of his family.
The Torah says that Avraham was blessed “BaKol” with everything. Ramban explains that in Kabbalistic thought, “kol” signifies an element of God’s interactions with the universe. And, to the extent that I can make sense of Ramban’s Kabalistic writings, it is Knesset Yisrael, the collective Jewish people, the “Kalah” of Shir HaShirim who serve as God’s partner in this interaction. Avraham was blessed “bakol” because he was able to see the unfolding of Jewish history in Eretz Yisrael and the growth of his family from small and humble beginnings into something great.
That capacity remains a precious commodity. In our national life for sure, but in our personal and private lives as well, there is a need for resiliency and a need for adopting a long-term perspective. We cannot respond in extreme and reactive ways to every momentary crisis and we do not ever have the luxury of submitting to despair. Avraham felt blessed, and was blessed, because he saw a tall and mighty tree when he held a small seed in his hand. That blessing is in our hands as well if we choose to see it.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 