For Jews, Israel is land of tradition, conflict

Beginning in the late 19th century, Zionism became something more than just an idea, thanks to a Viennese Jewish journalist named Theodor Herzl, who single-handedly started a campaign to create a Jewish state.

In 1903, when the British government offered Herzl a portion of their colony of Uganda as a refuge for persecuted Jews, the offer was soundly rejected by the Zionist Congress that Herzl had helped create.

This decision reinforced for everyone that a connection to the land of Israel was integral to Zionism and Jewish identity.

It is impossible to separate the idea of the land of Israel itself from the vision and dream that Jews harbored for two millenniums to return to Zion and create a dynamic political, spiritual and cultural force in the world.

Today we cannot help but recognize the deep conflicts Jewish claims to this land have produced. But putting aside those conflicts for just a moment, can we at least acknowledge the meaning of the land of Israel in the Jewish mind?

The beloved theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel described the Jewish people's connection to the land of Israel in the following way: "The love of this land was due to an imperative, not to an instinct or a sentiment. There is a covenant of the people to the land. We live by covenants. We could not betray our pledge or discard the promise."

The theology of the Bible is based upon the premise that the land of Israel is the center of the covenant between God and the Israelites. Beginning with the promise of Abraham and the wanderings of the Hebrews in the desert, God held out the land as the fulfillment of the divine promise if the ancient Israelites would agree to follow the commandments. The prophets taught holding on to that land was conditional on the people's moral and ethical behavior.

For 2,000 years we read the texts of the rabbis, their poems, mystical writings and Talmudic sayings that kept the fires burning inside the Jewish soul that the land of Israel, real or imagined, was part and parcel of the collective conscience of the Jewish people.

By the 19th century, nationalist ideologies flourished in Europe. European Jews dared for the first time in history to revive their rightful claim to the holy land. They revived biblical Hebrew, transforming it into a living, breathing language. They turned the swamps into inhabitable cities and the desert into gardens. Jewish political and spiritual aspirations would no longer be channeled only through rabbinic scholarship and academies of learning. Now it would be the sweat and labor of a new generation of immigrants to till the soil to reinvent Jewish self-determination.

Jews had for the first time in 2,000 years the opportunity to break all previously held stereotypes about them in the past. It was the land that was the key to open the doorway to freedom from longtime hatred and prejudice.

In the course of the 20th century, Jewish immigrants to Palestine and later the state of Israel viewed the meaning of this land through the lenses of their ideologies; socialists, the orthodox and refugees from war. Israel means different things to Israelis and is no different than what America means to the different kinds of peoples who make up our country.

Surely Israel is a diverse patchwork of ethnic and racial groups which include the Arab community. But what remains constant is the land.

The Judean hills or the desert, the fertile crescent of the northern parts of the country -- all is considered sacred land. The memory of kings, priests and prophets pervade every inch of the land. And it is that feeling of connection to history that follows not only the tourists but Israel's citizens as well.

Most Jews possess deep-seated (almost instinctual) feelings for the land of Israel, but, these same feelings are also part of the collective consciousness of the Israelis themselves. These emotions often translate into a moral imperative for growing Israel, reconnecting the bonds of the past back toward our biblical ancestors and finding the elusive answer to the problem of peaceful co-existence.

Israel also is struggling to balance both religious and non-religious sensibilities, along with the demands of competing political constituencies.

Herzl did not live long enough to see his dream of a Jewish state fulfilled. But he understood what generations of Jews in the 20th century came to understand about Zionism: that the political, cultural and spiritual aspirations of the Jewish people could only be fulfilled in the land of Israel.

The people and the land are bound together.

Both Christians and Muslims have their own deep feelings about this land, and I hope we will live to see all three communities living peacefully in the land of Israel, side by side.

Rabbi Brad L. Bloom is the rabbi at Congregation Beth Yam on Hilton Head Island. He can be reached at 843-689-2178.