The People and the Book: Conditional covenant

Our hold on this land is conditional on our moral behavior, as individuals and as a people.

By RON KRONISH
Painting by Pepe Fainberg (photo credit: PEPE FAINBERG)
Painting by Pepe Fainberg
(photo credit: PEPE FAINBERG)
The return of the Jewish People to its ancestral homeland has been nothing short of a miracle. Our people retained a dream of returning to the Land of Israel for more than 2,000 years and, in 1948, it came true.
But we are reminded many times in the Torah, including in the Torah portion of Behar, that our hold on the land of Israel is conditional on our moral behavior in our own state. We read that the Land of Israel belongs to God, and the Jewish People are but “strangers and residents” with him. Moreover, we are also commanded to bring redemption to the land.
The idea of the conditionality of our hold on the land is also expressed beautifully in a creative passage in the Haggada of the Hashomer Hatzair Movement, which I read at our family Seder only a few weeks ago. In this innovative “invocation,” we find the following Israeli version of this famous “introduction” to the Seder: “All who are hungry, let them come and partake. All who are in need, let them come and celebrate the Passover. This year, only we (who live in Israel) are the redeemed of Israel. Next year, it shall be all the People of Israel. This year, we are slaves; next year, we shall be free people.”
The authors of this passage were keenly aware that although we are fortunate to have returned to live in the sovereign Jewish State of Israel, in which we can control our destiny, this does not mean that we are entirely free. Indeed, we are still “slaves” to old ways of thinking, which we brought with us from the exile and to new ways of controlling other people that we have been doing for the past 100 years or so, and, in particular for the past 48 years, with the ongoing occupation of the West Bank since 1967.
It is quite clear from the Torah in other famous passages as well that the land will “vomit” us out if we don’t behave ourselves! “Otherwise the land will vomit you out for defiling it, as it vomited out the nation that was before you. For whoever commits any of these abominations shall be cut off from their people.  So keep my charge not to commit any of these abominations that were done before you, and not to defile yourselves by them: I am the Lord your God.” (Leviticus 18:28-30).
There is, therefore, no divine or historical imperative that the Jewish People will retain sovereignty forever in this land. On the contrary, the Torah text reminds us again and again that only if we live up to the terms of the covenant that was given to us “on the mountain” of Sinai (Behar, the name of our Torah portion in Hebrew, actually means “on the mountain”), will we endure in this land.
What does it mean “to bring redemption to the land”? The text could have used other more agricultural words, like “to fertilize” or “to cultivate.” Yet, the word “redeem” was chosen. How does one redeem the land? According to Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, the great 19th century German Modern Orthodox commentator, “the land does not tamely endure any degeneration of its inhabitants. The flourishing of the land is attached to the moral flourishing of the people it engenders whom it feeds with its products and enriches with its treasures.”
The early Zionist pioneers redeemed the land with their hands and feet. Many of them, both secular and religious Jews, saw the land as holy, special, and unique.
But are we permitted to redeem this land by impure, unethical means? The prophets of Israel – whose spiritual presence is enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence – warned us over and over again that if we don’t build a society that is based on social justice for the widow and the orphan and the stranger (non-Jew) in our midst, we will fail in our task of living up to the ethical demands of our covenant with the divine presence.
Our hold on this land, therefore, is conditional on our moral behavior, as individuals and as a people. This will include the need to treat the “strangers” in our midst with dignity and with recognition of their humanity now, and in the future. 
Jerusalem-based Rabbi Ron Kronish is the Founding Director of the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel, a department of Rabbis for Human Rights; he is editor of a new book of essays, Coexistence and Reconciliation in Israel – Voices for Interreligious Dialogue.