Three shemitah cycles ago, back in 2008, Sara and I lived and studied in Israel and had the experience of observing the special laws of shemitah, the Sabbatical year. We were not property owners and did not farm, and so the main way in which our lives were implicated by these mitzvot were through the produce that we purchased that year. Every fruit and vegetable had a halakhic story to tell. Was it imported from overseas? Was it grown and harvested by Palestinian farmers? Was it from an Israeli farm which had sold its land to a gentile so that the land could be farmed during the shemitah year? Was the produce from a farm that remained in Jewish hands and which a beit din supervised the harvesting and sale of all the produce that grew on its own without forbidden agricultural labor?
I remember bags of carrots with long halakhic essays printed on them. And, as a New Yorker who had never lived in a house with a yard, I also had my first experiences with counter-top composting. Fruits and vegetables that have kedushat shevi’it, the sanctity of produce that grows in Eretz Yisrael during the shemitah year can be eaten but cannot be destroyed or treated disrespectfully so long as they can still be considered food. So, one can drink wine made from grapes that have kedushat shevi’it, but one cannot extinguish a havdalah candle in that wine. One can eat an apple with kedushat shevi’it, but one cannot throw the apple core into the garbage so long as it still has even a minute quantity of edible apple surrounding the seeds. Instead, apple cores and the bit of red that clings to a watermelon rind, and other edible kitchen scraps should be placed in a “shemitah bin” where they are kept clean and separate from garbage and where they can decompose over several days until they are no longer edible, at which point they can be discarded.
Just as the sanctity of Shabbat is not a vague and sentimental feeling or the aroma of chicken soup, but is actually something that is expressed through a vast web of precise and specific obligations and prohibitions that are applicable during one day of the week alone, the sanctity of the Land of Israel is something that is expressed through a vast web of obligations and prohibitions that pertain in specific territory alone.
By the time the Babylonian Talmud was edited, sometime, we believe, in 6th century Babylonia, the Jewish people had already settled in Eretz Yisrael twice. The first time was the conquest under the leadership of Yehoshua. The second time was the peaceful return to Eretz Yisrael under the aegis of the Persian king Cyrus. The Talmud understands these two episodes to have been the precipitating moments that endowed the Land of Israel with its sanctity. But, the Talmud assumes that these two moments in history in which we sanctified the Land of Israel, were not equal. The lands that Yehoshua conquered, along with the territories that David added to his kingdom, were endowed with sanctity only until they were subsequently conquered in turn by our Assyrian and Babylonian enemies. Whereas the smaller territory that was settled peacefully by those who returned to Israel from the Babylonian exile retains its sanctity forever.
The Jews who ascended to Eretz Yisrael from Babylonia settled in a much smaller territory and determining the boundaries of where they settled was an important subject of halakhic debate because that determined the extent of the kedushah of Eretz Yisrael which in turn determined where the mitzvot unique to the Land of Israel could be observed.
Why does hazakah – living somewhere, uninterrupted, for a period of years, without the dissent of neighbors, establish a permanent sanctity whereas conquest establishes sanctity only so long as the conquest endures? The Talmud never answers that question. Many years ago, I devised an answer to that question which I believed was my own hiddush – my own original Torah insight. I was delighted to learn Rav Baruch Gigi, one of the rashei yeshiva at Yeshivat Har Etzion also had the same hiddush, and he, in turn, was delighted to learn that the hiddush actually preceded both of us by four hundred years and appears explicitly in the commentary to the Mishnah of Rabbi Yom Tov Lipman Heller known as the “Tosafot Yom Tov.”
“It seems to me,” he writes, “that the conquest of the Land of Israel by Gentiles undoes the effects of its prior conquest by Jews whereas the peaceful settlement through hazakah – uninterrupted and uncontested settlement – when the King of Persia granted permission, cannot be undone by conquest since the land was freely given to its new Jewish inhabitants at that time.”
The 19th century philosopher Hegel explores, what I believe to be, a similar dynamic in his writings on the “master slave dialectic” in his book The Phenomenology of Spirit.
If you imagine a paradigm in which two self-conscious individuals meet. Each wants to be recognized as the superior, independent self. This leads to a struggle for dominance. The victor of that struggle imposes his will on the other and demands recognition as the superior and dominant individual. The master receives obedience and service from the slave, but the master will never receive the recognition from the slave since the slave lacks the freedom and autonomy to offer recognition. Dominance, Hegel argues, is a self-defeating dynamic that can never satisfy the need for recognition that it seeks to fill.
Parashat Haye Sarah begins with a strange sort of negotiation in which Avraham, in a very public and demonstrable way, insists on purchasing a burial plot for Sarah. The dialogue is almost comical, two negotiators, each insisting on giving to the other what the other does not ask for. Avraham wants to purchase a burial plot, Efron says it will be a gift, Avraham insists on paying, Efron says it will be a gift, but after all, what is four-hundred silver shekel between friends?
What is going on? Avraham wants his family’s burial plot to be more than just a right-of-way to a cemetery plot in someone else’s field. He wants it to be an “achuzah” a term that appears here for the first time in the Torah and means the sort of possession that is passed down from generation to generation within a family. Avraham didn’t want permission to bury Sarah in someone else’s field, he wanted territory that would belong to his family forever and he understood that a gift offered out of a sense of awe, or even respect, to a someone characterized as נְשִׂ֨יא אֱ-לֹהִ֤ים אַתָּה֙ בְּתוֹכֵ֔נוּ a prince of God in our midst, might not be given freely.
Rashi notes that there is another instance in Scripture in which something is purchased at “full price” בְּכֶ֨סֶף מָלֵ֜א – King David’s purchase of the threshing floor of Aravna to be the site of the future Beit HaMikdash. David HaMelekh did a lot of conquest in his day, but he paid full price for the location of the Beit Hamikash.
Of course one does not have to be a full fledged Marxist to recognize that sometimes people are coerced to sell goods or services, but compared to conquest and even compared to a right given by an imperial king in a foreign capital, a purchase between a willing buyer and seller, represents a form of consent that can uniquely bestow recognition.
Avraham had called himself a גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁ֥ב – resident alien – an oxymoron that characterized his own awareness of his presence in Eretz Yisrael. His purchase of a burial plot was a sort of down payment for his descendents eventually possessing all of Eretz Yisrael, and yet, he was an immigrant and a vulnerable minority among his Canaanite neighbors, dependent on their good will and willingness to sell him a burial plot. Ger v’Toshav: the term evokes ambivalence between asserting a right and asking for a favor. There is inherent awkwardness in that tension and I think we feel that too at times.
From its earliest days, the tension that Avraham characterized as גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁ֥ב has accompanied the Zionist movement and the modern return of the Jewish people to Eretz Yisrael. Our connection, as Jews to our own history in Eretz Yisrael are unquestionable and undeniable and completely independent of the opinions of anyone else. And yet, the Zionist movement, from its earliest stages, was insistent on building “a Jewish national home” that was “secured under public law.” Zionism has celebrated Jewish autonomy, even as the State of Israel, like every modern state, exists in a web of alliances and trading partners and international organizations that undermine the very concept of sovereignty itself.
This can be frustrating. Shouldn’t independence entail no longer having to care about what the rest of the world thinks? This is especially frustrating if the rest of the world appears prejudiced or hypocritical or worse. But I think the tension is inescapable.
I would suggest that we recognize the two poles of the גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁ֥ב dialectic. This means we should apologize to nobody when emphasizing our history in Eretz Yisrael and can be loud and proud when celebrating the culture of modern Israel and spreading it within our families and communities.
But our sources suggest that there will always be something tenuous and tentative about our presence in Eretz Yisrael until it is freely endorsed by all our neighbors. Jewish conquest can be undone by the conquest of our enemies. Land settled without contest and with the free agreement of neighbors is sanctified forever.
During the years that I lived in Israel I often said that “archeological Zionism” – walking the same paths as Avraham and Sarah, was much less compelling to me than the achievements of modern Jewish culture and Torah scholarship that thrives in Israel. I rarely visited the Kotel because there are so many wonderful shuls in Yerushalayim and, frankly, life is too short for bad davening. But I fantasize about making it back to Israel one year for Shavuah HaSefer- Book week, where every city in Israel hosts book fairs where all the publishing houses sell books at steep discounts and introduce their new works of literature and scholarship.
But the archeological Zionism and the cultural achievements of modern Israel are not entirely disconnected. Only a yearning to return to an ancestral homeland could have excited sufficient numbers of Jews to gather in one place and renew Jewish life. The best translation I have heard for Eretz Yisrael is “the land where the Jews live.” The halakhah reflects this. The scope and nature of its sanctity itself, the mitzvot that can be performed only in Eretz Yisrael, is determined by the settlement patterns of the Jewish people. Our settlement patterns, in turn, reflect a connection to our history. But they also reflect pragmatism. Those who ascended from Babylonia, the Talmud teaches, deliberately avoided settling in certain regions of the North so that those areas would be exempt from the restrictions of shemitah which, in later centuries, made it easier for Jews to grow food.
Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik taught that there was no such thing, in Judaism, as inherent sanctity. All holiness is created by human actions and human choices. The sanctity of the Land of Israel cannot endure through force; it endures through cultivation.
The Talmud’s distinction between sanctity born of conquest and sanctity born of hazakah is a technical legal principle that reinforces a moral and philosophical principle. What we seize, even when justified, can always be seized from us. What we build, through presence, relationship, and mutual recognition, cannot be taken away. The Tosafot Yom Tov sensed this four centuries ago; Hegel sensed it in his time; and Avraham models it at the very dawn of our history. Anything that you wish to endure must be grounded in free recognition, not dominance. A burial plot freely purchased, not imposed. A national home secured under public law, not by the sword alone.
It is exhausting to have Israel and Jews be the object of so much scrutiny. We feel like political footballs, batted back and forth by teams trying to achieve their own ends, not really caring about our interests. But precisely because the eyes of the world remain focused on Eretz Yisrael, to paraphrase Sefer Devarim, from the beginning of the year until its end מֵֽרֵשִׁית֙ הַשָּׁנָ֔ה וְעַ֖ד אַחֲרִ֥ית שָׁנָֽה׃ – once peace does come there, it will do no less than transform the entire world.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 