| Friday 13 October 2023 - 28 Tishrei 5784
Sedra Bereishit
FOCUS ON THE LAND OF ISRAEL
LAST SHABBAT, THE FINAL DAY OF THE FESTIVALS in Israel, and the penultimate day elsewhere, a devastating attack against Israel and the Jewish people was launched from Gaza, for the most part against civilians: men, women and children. On that last day of the Festival, the Torah reading includes concluding the Torah and then beginning it again: "In the beginning G-d created Heaven and Earth". Outside Israel this was read on Sunday. This Shabbat, all over the world, the same words are read again as the first Sedra1 of the Torah. As is well known, this first Sedra gives an account of the Creation of the world: in six days G-d created Heaven and Earth. It seems quite natural that this is how the Torah should begin. The great Sage Rashi2 wrote a famous Commentary on the Torah. He begins this Commentary with a question. He explains that the Torah is primarily a book of laws and guidance from G-d. Every word, even every letter, is teaching us something about how we should act in our personal and public lives in order to bring the world to perfection. Since this is the case, he asks: why begin the Torah with the account of Creation? Why not begin somewhere in the Book of Exodus, where we start to learn the specific commandments from G-d to the Jewish people? Since the Torah is primarily a book of laws, why does it begin with the ancient history of the past? Rashi's answer, written some nine hundred years ago, is that the function of the beginning of the Torah is to clarify the status of the Land of Israel. Despite international opinion, he says, it belongs to the Jews. Rashi writes: If the nations of the world accuse the Jewish people of being bandits, having unfairly taken possession of the Land of Israel from peoples who possessed it earlier, the Jews can answer: the whole world belongs to G-d. He created it, and gave it to whoever He wanted. He chose to give the Land of Israel to certain nations, then He took it from them and gave it to us. Why should the nations of the world call us 'bandits'? Many countries originally belonged to one nation and then were taken over by another. What is special about the Jews? The Lubavitcher Rebbe explains this is because the relationship of the Jewish people with the Land of Israel is on a particularly deep level. It is not just the land in which we live. Israel is indeed our ancestral land, the land of our early history: yet it is also more than this. Our essence is bound up with the essence of the sacred Land of Israel. Once we took possession of the Land it became ours in an essential and permanent way. For ever more, it was not just a country like any other, but the Holy Land, the Land of the Jewish People, the Land of Israel. Hence, even when later we were sent away into exile, our thoughts and our prayers continued to focus on our Land. We are spiritually bonded with it. We call it 'our Land' even if we have never visited it. Nothing can take the Land of Israel away from us. For millennia, wherever we were, our prayers have been directed towards Jerusalem, the heart of the holy Land. This deep relationship sometimes provokes a form of envy among the nations. G-d has given us the essence of the Land in a way which surpasses ordinary human experience. So at the very beginning of the Torah we are taught our special relationship with the Holy Land. G-d created the whole world and He gave the Holy Land to the Jewish people, for ever. Through this bonding of the Jewish people with the Holy Land, G-d's blessing to Abraham will ultimately be fulfilled: "Go... to the Land which I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you... and through you will be blessed all families of the earth" (Gen. 12:1-3). As a result of the deep bond of the Jewish people with the Land, blessing will ultimately come to all humanity3.
1. Genesis 1:1-6:8. 2. Rashi, Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, lived in Franco-Germany in the 11th century. He wrote a Commentary on the entire Bible and also on most of the Talmud. 3. Based on the Lubavitcher Rebbe's Likkutei Sichot vo1.5, pp. 1-I5.
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