In Celtic stories, the health of the land is reflected in the health of the king. If the land is sick, the king becomes sick.
In Jewish stories, the relationship with the Land belonged to the whole community. If members of the community were "sick," the Land would become sick and vomit them out.
Each of us should be aware of our connection to the Land. Secular Israelis focus on the ground under their feet. They say of ritual practice: we don’t need to do that because living in the Land is enough.
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In an earlier post, I mentioned that I am puzzled when I express my feeling that I belong
to the Land, to Eretz Yisrael. No one uses that preposition to describe his or her connection to a place. Why do I use it?
Why am I more myself in Israel? Why does part of my soul dim when I am outside the Land?
Only today, did I consider the obvious answer: because the Land is the root of our being, our mother.
A few years ago, when I realized that today’s "traditional" Judaism was not something toward which I felt much respect, I was thinking about attitudes and values. If I had been thinking of specific beliefs, perhaps it would have been obvious to me that it has lost some connection to the land, and that the ancient Israelites, like other peoples, may have thought of Earth as Mother.
The prophets of the Second Temple period would have opposed an idea like that, much as many of them opposed the worship of god’s consort, Asherah. But is there evidence that the Israelites viewed the Land as mother? Maybe…
A midrash tells of a vision experienced by Jeremiah, who had prophesied the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian Exile.
Jeremiah said: When I went up to Jerusalem, I looked up and saw a woman sitting on top of the mountain, clad in black, her hair disheveled, crying and hoping that someone would comfort her. And I too was crying and hoping that someone would comfort me. I approached her and spoke to her and said to her: "If you are a woman, speak to me, and if you are a spirit, get away from me!"
She responded and said to me: "Don't you recognize me? I am she who had seven sons. Their father went overseas, and while I went up and cried about him, behold another [messenger] came and said to me: 'The house fell upon your seven sons and killed them' [cf. Job 1:18-19]. Now I do not know for whom I should cry and for whom I should dishevel my hair!"
I answered and said to her: "You are not better than my Mother Zion, who has become a grazing ground for the beasts of the field."
She answered and said to me: "I am your Mother Zion, I am the mother of seven, for it is written, 'She that hath borne seven laguisheth' (Jer. 15:9)."
Jeremiah saw that her sufferings were like those of Job who had lost seven sons, and he assured her (and himself) that just as Job had been comforted, she would be, too; her children would be returned to her. Jeremiah was right: we returned after the First Exile ended, just as Jacob's descendants had returned from Egypt. The Second Exile has ended, too. After every exile, we have returned because we belong to the Land, we are the children of "Mother Zion."
Our relationship to the Land is primary. Abraham had to go to “a land that I will show you” before he learned to “walk with god.”
Over the millennium, Judaism helped us preserve our awareness of our connection to the Land even as it preserved us. However, in some ways, it may obscure our relationship to the Land.
The traditional prayers were written in response to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. Words became a substitute for a place and for ritual. Words can be reinterpreted, but they may still stand between life and us. Pilgrimage and ritual were lived experiences from which we could grow in entirely new directions; words are cognitive. Traditional prayers expressed our yearning to return to the Land, but they focused on the symbol of the destroyed temple.
Keeping kosher has kept us Jewish, but it has also become an end in itself. Many Jews visiting Jerusalem feel they aren’t “really” keeping kosher because it takes no effort to order in restaurants, or purchase food in stores, since nearly every establishment is kosher. In Israel, you don’t have to do anything to be Jewish; you simply are. (Once you get used to it, it's wonderful!)
Striving to keep the Land in our memories, the rabbis who wrote the Babylonian Talmud chose to expound on Temple sacrifices. On the other hand, the Palestinian Talmud, written by rabbis still living in the Land, does not address rituals once performed in the Temple that had been destroyed by the Romans, in a city where they were forbidden to step foot. Since they had continued to live in the Land, they focused on its the agricultural cycles. Six hundred years later, the Palestinian Talmud would be neglected in favor of the Babylonian Talmud. (The culture of Babylonia influenced the writers of the
Bavli into a twisted and mistrustful view of women new to Jewish culture.)
The Exile has ended; shouldn’t the prayers of people living in the Land change?
A few years ago, I came to the conclusion that Judaism had been out of the Land too long and its "traditional" forms had lost something essential. Like other religions, Orthodox Judaism has also come to focus on preserving itself and its leaders. Secular Israelis are present to the Land and to each other; the
datim, the religious, did not seem to have those connections. Outside of Israel, Reform Jews and Reform rabbis exhibit sincerity, care, social awareness, and ethics; in the Land, as someone once told me, “The good folk are eating at Café Smadar on Shabbat.”
The Land is our home. “Traditional” Judaism, in Israel, is a thing in itself. The rabbis preserve themselves and their authority. Could one of the reasons that many Israelis are secular be that traditional Judaism focuses on
memories of the Land instead of the Land?
Today, many people have re-discovered that if we recall our relationship to the earth, we will be recalled to ourselves. I feel that when I hike outdoors. I feel it even more when I am in Israel—even in a city. Going back to our roots, becoming our truest selves, can only be done if we are present to this place and moment, if we become aware of the sacred moving through life. Rationality won't help you know what is appropriate for you at this particular moment. We need act for our souls and for the Land (whatever land we live in) regardless of what other people expect of us.
Our relationship with the Land has been a series of returns and exiles. Abraham “returned” to himself when he entered the Land. During a famine, the children of Jacob left for Egypt; their children returned. Ruth “returned.” Isaiah asked the exiles in Babylon, “Are you ready to change?” Will you gratefully embrace living in the Land?
Hidden in the holiday of Purim (“lots”) and the Scroll of Esther is the message that we might—but only by chance—survive outside our Land, but we will never belong in those other places no matter how we try to assimilate. (Esther was named after the goddess Ishtar and Mordechai after the god Marduk, but it was chance, not their Babylonian names that saved their lives.) Even though God is never mentioned in the Scroll of Esther, it is said that this is the only text that will be read in the Days to Come.
When secular Jews from Europe began returning to the Land in the early 1800s, they saw the Land in a different light than their exiled ancestors had seen it. The blinders of belief—religious belief, anyway—had been removed. I do not know how Sephardic and Mizrachi Jews already living in the Land viewed it. Ironically, religious, European Jews initially opposed returning to the Land for theological reasons: the Messiah had to get us there, we should not do it on our own; they had internalized the idea of being powerless.
In the kibbutzim of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, holidays were celebrated only as agricultural holidays, without reference to their historical or theological themes, e.g., Shavuot was only a harvest festival, it wasn’t the anniversary of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai.
Secular Israelis focus on the ground under their feet. They say of ritual practice: we don’t need to do that because living in the Land is enough. (although... when I was in Israel, I helped harvest oranges that would be given to the poor during
shmita, the sabbatical year, and every once in a while, a secular Israeli would surprise me with a commitment to some aspect of religious tradition.)
As far as I know, kibbutzniks did not know of god's consort, Asherah. (Wouldn't it be nice if they had?)
And
Ima Adamah, Mother Earth, was only a poetic concept.
When Jerusalem was regained, soldiers prayed at the Wall. They did not go to the Temple Mount; for the sake of peace, Israel declared that Muslims would retain control of Temple Mount. Secular Israelis (i.e., most Israelis) don’t dream of a rebuilt Temple. They are far more down to earth.
Where can I learn more about being connected to one's ancestral land? In addition to reading
Tanakh with greater attention, I wonder what might be learned from reading Celtic myths. Although Celts and Jews were always very different, my gut tells me they had something in common.
My knowledge of history is limited, but it seems Rome had a special animosity toward these two peoples, especially to their religions. It was not the religious bigotry of Christianity or the racial bigotry of the modern era. It was an animosity towards those who would not succumb to Roman authority. Both people were committed to freedom. Was there something shared by these two religions that the Romans feared could outlive their empire and their culture? Perhaps both these spiritualties had an awareness of the land and of the present moment that wasn’t blinded by fear of empire.
The teachings of the Druids were not committed to paper. Once written down, belief ossifies, people focus on someone else's experiences instead of seeking their own. Once written down it becomes primary and must be preserved. Judaism was not always as deeply grounded in text as it has been for the last two thousand years. The Torah was read aloud to the people, but most stories, laws, and moral teachings were oral. Before Rome destroyed the Second Temple it was forbidden to commit the oral tradition to paper. Since those traditions weren’t written down yet, early Christians appropriated less than half our sacred texts—the part they demean by calling it the “Old” Testament—and developed their own understanding of them. Christianity feels like an extension of the Roman Empire.
The oral teachings were committed to paper immediately after the destruction of the Temple. During the siege of Jerusalem, a teacher named Yohanan ben Zakkai had himself smuggled out of the city in a coffin so that he could speak to the Roman general, Vespasian. He predicted that Vespasian would destroy the Temple and become emperor of Rome. Flattered, Vespasian granted Yohanan ben Zakkai’s request that ben Zakkai and a few other sages be permitted to set up a center of Jewish learning there. (Yohanan ben Zakkai abandoned his people to save his religion, but it is partly due to him that Jews in the Diaspora retained their heritage.)
It was the sages in Yavneh who wrote down an outline of the oral law, the Mishnah, and then rabbis in Palestine and Bablyonia commented on it, creating the Talmud.
Before the state was destroyed and the people dispersed, Jewish prayer was spontaneous. Prayers became set after the destruction to substitute for pilgrimage to the Temple, animal sacrifices, and other offerings. Centuries later, Moses Mendelssohn recognized that something had atrophied. Traditional prayers, he said,
resound with perpetually repeated sighs for the return of the lost land… even in the prayers of thanks for food and joy and in the blessings under the canopy, there resounds the plaintive cry of slaves… who pine for the Messiah who shall bring the dispersed remnants of Israel back to Palestine.
The majority of
olim, before the Shoah, were secular idealists, not the traditionally religious. Tht's why they were able to create a Jewish state. Today, many Israelis say that living in the land is enough.
Religion is essential to remember who we are in the diaspora, but we can only be fully ourselves, when we are rooted in our own land.
