Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

Why this fierce attachment to the land? Why this territorial obsession that runs throughout Jewish history? Why this negotiation in London, in Oslo, in Israel over land and territory?

We meet it first in the covenant between God and father Abraham: "Get thee out of thy country and from thy kindred and from thy father's land unto the land that I will show you." The covenant is bathed in mystery. It is a land not named yet but one which God will appoint. It is as it were a supernatural land and it is the heritage of our posterity: (Verse 7) "Unto thy seed which I give thee.” It is not any land. It is a chosen land. In the tradition of an ancient people it is regarded as the axis mundi, the center of the world. Israel is the center of the world and Jerusalem is the center of the center and the holy of holies is the center of the center of the center. Israel is the size of a postage stamp but with the concerns of a universe.

Why specifically this land? Chaim  Weitzman is asked by a member of the British Peel Commission, "Certainly, Dr. Weitzman, there are lands closer to where your people are and easier to settle. Why do you insist upon this place and this land?" Weitzman responds, "We visit our mothers who are located far from where we live. Between our homes and the homes of our mothers there are other mothers closer, more conveniently located. Why do we not visit them instead of making the journey miles and miles away? Why not choose a mother closer to you?"

There are few greater maledictions in the Bible than expulsion from the land, from alienation, from exile, from homelessness. This wandering people knows that it has not found its native soil and that it must return. This profound yearning enters every aspect of our liturgy. How do we begin our daily grace after meals but with Psalm 137:   "How shall we sing the song of the Lord in a foreign land. If I ever forget you O Jerusalem let my right hand be withered. Let my tongue cleave to my palate if I forget thee." We live in many lands. We are everywhere guests. Nowhere at home.

Where shall we be buried so that our head rests in soil that welcomes us? The casket may be solid and ornate but a small bag of soil from Israel will be laid beneath the head of the deceased. This expresses a deep yearning for a return to one's own roots, to one's ancestors, to one's self.

It is not only a matter of a biblical covenant. It is a matter of empirical history. This is a deracinated people living with the terror of homelessness. This is a people that belongs no where, that has no soil to sink its roots like a tree but is more like a fluttering bird, skipping from branch to branch. Exiled from land to another this is a people who have become luftmenschen, people who live in the air, who live with fantasy and desperate imagination. This is a de-natured people that imagines its weather and its seasons. There is pathos in the prayers around Sukkoth for geshem, for rain, and around Passover, the prayer for dew. Turn to page 180 in the Prayer Book. So Jews will count the omer, the beginning of the grain harvest and explain it as the barley season. But there is no dew and no barley and no harvest. The liturgical calendar is fictitious. It substitutes memory and dream for reality here and now.

Something is missing in our lives. Even when the wine flows over the cup of the marriage ceremony. There is a glass to be broken to express our sense of incompleteness. We pray for the future even as we shatter the glass. Soon may there be established in Jerusalem in which there is love and harmony, peace and contentment and the festivals of youth.

Not to have a land, not to have a space, not to have power is to be cursed. With the curse of hasheurus, the curse of the wandering Jew the poet Heinrich Heine called us that "mummy race" which wanders over the world wrapped in the most ancient swathing bands of letters, a petrified fragment of the history of the world.

The Jews walk in tachrichim, in shrouds. The Jew is a ghost like figure. He has been everywhere, seen everything, done everything, thought everything, suffered everything. But he has no substance, no ground, no place. The church father whose sermon I read filled me with fear. The church father, John Chyrostom, concluded his sermon by stating starkly "Jews, you are hated."

Listen to the malediction in the letter written by Pope Innocent III of the thirteenth century: "Jews, like the fratricide Cain, are doomed to wander about the earth as fugitives and vagabonds. And their faces must be covered with shame...they are to be condemned to serfdom."

I was raised before the State of Israel was established. And I recall in high school reading Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and recognizing the genius of the bard and his understanding of the pitiful impotence of the Jew. Who could forget the cry of impotence and his terrifying appeal to be recognized as human.

"Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, senses, dimensions, passions? Fed with the same food, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter as a Christian is? When you prick us do we not bleed; when you tickle us do we not laugh; when you poison us do we not die?"

How sad the banality of the appeal, the desperate need to insist "we are human.”

"When you poison us do we not die?"  We die not only in body but in soul. And we are consumed with an impotent rage. This is an impotent people whose teeth have been knocked out of its gums. If a Jew cannot bite, his anger will bite into his own bowels. His body is ulcerated with anger of weakness that gnaws his intestines and twists down the corners of his lips into sadness.

How well does Shylock record the Jew's powerless, the loss of his daughter, the ridicule of his position, his whining sycophancy. And then in a brief soliloquy Shylock's refusal to accept Bassanio's invitation to dinner.  It is the pride of one who has been humiliated and must for his own sense of dignity retreat: "I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following. But I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you." This is the response of a deeply wounded man, a Jew spat upon, ground to the dust and alien for whom the separation of the dietary laws is as much an expression of his self-esteem as it is for his observing the law. He has no land but he has a piece of bread and over it he will recite "Blessed are Thou O Lord our God, King of the universe who has brought forth bread from the land.” That piece of bread sanctified by blessing is an attachment to the land from which he has been expelled.

The land in substance and symbol is therapy. The land is the hunger for normalcy. The land is the confirmation of one's humanity, of one's self-reliance, of one's independence.

The land is sanctuary not holy because it was the place where the Temple stood but because it is the place where salvation has worked in our lives and through our efforts. It is the saving not only of souls but of Jewish lives; of those from Arab countries and Ethiopia, Europe who have come beaten, battered, sick, and frightened.

The stones are heavier in Israel than anywhere.

It is a small land but with a remarkable capacity to stretch, to break down borders. A capacity to absorb, to contain, to embrace. Statistics are not people but even here they speak this worldly miracle. In 1948 this shrunken land held a population of six-hundred thousand Jews. Today, this small land absorbs six million Jews. This orphaned people escaped from the death camps of Europe possesses one half of the Jewish children of the world. Today, this land whose 50th birthday we celebrate contains one in three Jews of the world.

The quarrel over the negotiations to take place in London over the return of land whether it be thirteen percent or ten percent or eight percent is more simply than a question of geopolitics or military strategy. This small land is made up of great dreams. Those who built it recognized its healing value. We will build and be rebuilt by the land.

There is a second new chapter in the land. The land must be possessed but it must not possess us. The covenant and the promise of Abraham must be honored and revered in its entirety. For it speaks of a land that I will show you but it also concludes with an oath:  "I will make of thee a great nation and I will bless thee and make thy name great and be thou a blessing. And I will bless them that bless thee and him that curseth thee I will curse and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed."

The oath, the covenant, is not only about space and nature. It is also about time and history. For the land is not for its own sake. The land has a larger purpose. And the jubilee that we celebrate expresses it clearly. Leviticus 25:23 –  "And the land shall not be sold in perpetuity; for the land in Mine for ye are strangers and settlers with Me." Verse 25 – "If thy brother be waxen poor and sell some of his possessions then shall his kinsman that is next to him come and shall redeem that which his brother has sold."

Leviticus 25:9 – "Then shalt thou make proclamation with a blast of the horn on the tenth day of the seventh month. In the day of atonement shall ye make proclamation with the horn throughout all your land. And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof. It shall be a jubilee unto you and you shall return every man unto his possession. And you shall return every man unto his family. The jubilee shall that fiftieth year be to you. You shall not sow neither reap that which grows of itself in it nor gather the grapes in it of the undressed vines. For it is a jubilee. It shall be holy unto you. You shall eat the increase thereof out of the field. In this year of jubilee ye shall return every man unto his possessions."

The slave is to be freed and you are to remember (verse 55) "For unto Me the children of Israel are servants. They are My servants whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God."   

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