Judaism is a 3,000-Year-Old Love Affair With a Land
Covered in prayer shawls, ultra-Orthodox
Jewish men read from a Torah scroll
during the Jewish holiday of Passover in front of the Western Wall, the holiest site where Jews can pray,
in Jerusalem's Old City on April 24, 2016.
during the Jewish holiday of Passover in front of the Western Wall, the holiest site where Jews can pray,
in Jerusalem's Old City on April 24, 2016.
On Passover, Jews all over the world
change one sentence in their daily prayers; instead of praying for rain,
we begin to pray for dew. For in Israel the time for the grain harvest
has begun, and if the winds blow and the rains fall, the grain cannot be
harvested and will will rot in the field. Dew on the other hand, will
moisten the grain without damaging it. That simple change in the prayer
marks a profound truth about Judaism that touches on modern politics as
well.
Twenty-five years ago I was returning
from a two-day trip to New York. I ran into my teacher, the late Rabbi
Henry Fisher. We began talking, and he asked me if I had changed my
watch to accommodate New York time. “No,” I said, “I kept it on Los
Angeles time.” “Why?” he asked? “Because,” I answered, “I would soon be
home.”
Rabbi Fisher then told me that that is
why Jews all over the world prayed for rain or dew when it was needed in
Israel, no matter where they lived. The assumption of Jewish history is
they would soon be back in Jerusalem. They kept their clocks to the
time at home.
It has also been a tradition for many
centuries in Judaism to leave a corner of one’s house unpainted, to
remind us that this is a temporary dwelling. We are here only until we
are gathered back to Israel.
Such practices remind us that politics
should not obscure a deep truth about Judaism—it is a 3,000-year-old
love affair with a land. Nobel Prize winning writer Shai Agnon expressed
this idea with his usual wit. Elie Wiesel writes: “Shai Agnon had a
marvelous word in Stockholm when he received the Nobel Prize. He said,
‘Majesty, like all Jews I was born in Jerusalem, but then the Romans
came and moved my cradle to Buczacz.’” Agnon recalls the destruction of
the Temple 2,000 years ago as scattering all Jews from their birthplace,
the place to which he returned in his lifetime to become a storyteller
for his people and the world.
The Western wall may be the least
aesthetic of all the world’s great shrines. But Jews coax the mute wall
to words by placing notes in its cracks and crevices, filling up the
yearning of the ages, reminding themselves that this is the heartland of
their history. Throughout unparalleled wanderings, it was always to
this spot that they hoped to return.
The realization of a dream, like the
landing of a plane, reintroduces the friction of hard surfaces, of
forces pushing against each other. The Jewish return to Zion and the
revival of Hebrew as a spoken language is an astonishment of history,
but it has also been fraught and painful. Yet anyone who questions the
Jewish attachment to Israel ignores an ancient, enduring passion. For
generations, Jews in every corner of the globe prayed for the land they
had never seen, that many would never see. But they believed their
children or their children’s children might one day walk its streets and
harvest its crops, for they remembered the prophecy of Amos: “For I
shall plant you in your land, and you shall no more be plucked up
(9:15).” Israel is home.
David Wolpe
