Land grant: Israel and the promises of God

Christian Century, May 15, 2007 by Yehiel E. Poupko

NEITHER JEWS nor Christians (except for some evangelicals) were theologically prepared for the 20th-century return of the Jewish people to sovereignty in their ancient homeland of Israel. For most Christians, history was not supposed to turn out like this. St. Augustine held that, having rejected Jesus of Nazareth, the Jewish people were punished with the experience of exile, dispersion, wandering and homelessness. This was the dominant Christian understanding of the Jewish condition and destiny: Jewish exile witnessed to the truth of Christianity, and Jewish suffering and humiliation witnessed to divine punishment for Jews' rejection of Jesus.

Thus the Jewish return to sovereignty in the biblical homeland seems to threaten the fundamental coherence of historic Christianity. How could those who were exiled for rejecting Jesus now be blessed with sovereignty? After all, the Jewish people still do not accept Jesus as Christ.

Similarly, Judaism had never before considered the kind of return to Israel that occurred with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. In traditional Judaism, the promised return to the land of Israel will take place only at the end of days through the agency of the Messiah of the House of David. The Messiah has not arrived, yet the Jewish people as a nation has returned to sovereignty in the land of Israel. What is the religious meaning of this transformational event for Jews?

I will attempt to answer that question in a way that reflects the mainstream Jewish perspective. It is an awesome responsibility for a member of the community of the few to describe for the community of the many any aspect of his faith, especially when the subject is bound up with events unfolding before our eyes. This essay is not an exercise in scholarship but a presentation of belief. In keeping with Jewish tradition and practice, I have sought the counsel of a variety of rabbis and Jewish scholars, so that this account represents mainstream Conservative, Orthodox and Reform thinking (though each movement would express its beliefs in its own metaphors and symbols).

To understand sacred history one must go back to the beginning of the Torah. At the beginning of creation God brought order and harmony out of chaos. God saw that God's creation was good, and handed this good creation over to Adam and Eve. They were "to till and tend" the garden (Gen. 2:15). They were charged with being the custodians of God's harmonious creation. But they committed the sin of hubris, and because of it they were expelled from the garden.

God entrusted creation to humanity for the next 10 generations, but again humans sinned--committing the sins of violence and corruption (Gen. 6:12-13). God brought a flood and humanity was destroyed.

God then entrusted the order of creation to Noah, who was followed by another 10 generations. Then humanity sinned once again with hubris in the construction of the Tower of Babel. As a consequence humanity was dispersed over the Earth, and God allocated to each of the approximately 70 nations a parcel of land to be its own, where it could develop its language and national culture (Gen. 10).

When God despaired of humanity as the custodian of harmony, justice and righteousness, God entered into the Covenant of Peoplehood with Abraham and his descendants. An essential feature of the covenant is that the children of Abraham and Sarah will be God's chosen people--chosen for a purpose for which it is responsible. To fulfill this role, the children of Abraham and Sarah also needed a plot of land. The land was given not as a reward, but because it is necessary and essential in fulfilling the covenantal task. The land is the means for the sanctification of everyday life, which is the purpose of the covenant.

God chose one people, the children of Abraham and Sarah, who are the nation of Israel, to conduct its national life upon the land. This people would be different from all others in that it would have the task of constructing its life according to the mitzvot, the commandments of the Torah, which would be fully revealed later at Mount Sinai. And it would be challenged to bring blessing to the world through its life.

Judaism's purpose is the sanctification of ordinary life, communal and individual. Thus the largest number of mitzvot have to do with agriculture, commerce and property. Justice, righteousness and holiness can be found only in life's prosaic activities. The election of Israel and the grant of the land are meant to show the world what God expects from and can do with fallible human beings.

The Covenant of Peoplehood blossomed into the Covenant of Torah and mitzvot made with the Jews as a people in the revelation at Mount Sinai. Taken together, the Covenant of Peoplehood and the Covenant of Torah and mitzvot mean that Judaism is an indivisible partnership involving God, Torah, people and land.

According to the Torah (Gen. 13:14-17; 15:18-21), the Covenant of Peoplehood is unconditional and immutable, as is the grant of the land to the children of Abraham and Sarah. Only after the covenant at Sinai, in which Israel pledged to be faithful to the mitzvot, does residence in the land become conditional upon fulfillment of the mitzvot. The grant of the land remains irrevocable.