The Land of Israel plays an absolutely crucial part in Jewish thinking and Jewish history. From Abraham onwards there is a special relationship between the land and the people. "On that day God made an agreement with Abram saying, 'I will give your children this land from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.'" This agreement incorporated in it the exile in Egypt. "You should surely know that your children will be strangers in a land that is not theirs and they will serve them and they will oppress them for four hundred years." If one part happened as promised, one might reasonably expect the other part to be fulfilled too. The agreement also did not give Abraham immediate rights and he had to enter into treaties with the Philistines and buy land from the Hittites to bury his wife Sarah. The promise of the land seems to have been an expression of intent rather than an effective transfer. In practice, the exact terms of the territorial promise were never fulfilled. Unless of course Ishmael is included. After all, God did talk about the seed of Abraham without specifying anyone in particular. In which case, certainly, the seed of Abraham has done much better than this.

The Torah, itself, is heavily focused on Israel. The whole narrative leads up to the ultimate goal of settling in the land. Many laws are specifically related to the Land of Israel. There is a specific command to conquer the land, "And you should take over the land and live in it because I have given the land to you as an inheritance." And then there is a range of agricultural laws which were given in the wilderness in preparation for settlement in Israel. There are laws about when one can start to eat the produce of fruit trees, "When you come into the land and you plant fruit trees," and laws about how much one leaves for the poor, "Speak to the Children of Israel and say to them, 'When you come into the land which I am giving you and you reap the harvest'." There is the command relating to the Seventh Year release, "When you come into the land which am going to give you and the land will rest, a rest for God," and the Jubilee after seven seven-year cycles. Later on there is the law regarding the First Fruits, "When it will be that you come into the land which YHVH your God is going to give to you as an inheritance and you will take it over and dwell in it, you will bring the first fruits to God." There are special laws relating to cities in the Land of Israel, both with regard to buying and selling property and with regard to who can settle and where.

The laws that apply specifically to Israel were not just about land and agriculture. Civil law was integrated into the actual land, "And God spoke to Moses saying, 'Speak to the Children of Israel and say to them, 'When you cross the river Jordan into the land of Canaan, you should set aside cities of refuge.''". The cities of refuge were an important part of the penal system, and although some were to be set aside outside the borders of the land, the system would only take effect when the first cities were established in Israel. And the whole tribal inheritance system that carried with it a range of laws about inheritance and transfer, short-term and long-term, was based exclusively on the territory of the Jewish state, "Command the Children of Israel and say to them, 'When you come into the land of Canaan, this is the land that will fall to you as an inheritance.'"

If settlement in the Land of Israel was so crucial, one might have thought that the Torah would require everyone who came out of Egypt to go and settle in the Land of Israel. Yet, even then there were tribes who asked for permission to stay in Trans-Jordania and were allowed to stay there. The tribes of Reuben and Gad, later joined by part of Menashe, were allowed to remain on the lush cattle-rearing plains of Gilead, provided their warriors came and helped in the conquest of Canaan. So, in principle, living outside the Land of Israel can hardly have been contrary to the Divine Will. Certainly, it was not the ideal. The number of cities of refuge across the Jordan were out of proportion to the population and more numerous than those in the main sector. The feeling must have been that further away from the core of the Jewish people, standards were bound to decline. Nevertheless, Moses, with God's sanction, agreed. So the ideal was not an absolute.

2

In Jewish law, the conquest and the sanctification of the land had both theological and practical ramifications. If certain laws applied to the produce of the land, the boundaries had to be defined. And if settlement was in any way related to the holiness of the land, where did this holiness derive from? The rabbis debated this issue in depth. The holiness of the land derived, first of all, from the invasion of Joshua roughly three thousand two hundred years ago. There was a second consecration under Ezra, two thousand five hundred years back, when he established the new Jewish settlement under the auspices of the Persian Empire. There is a long-running debate as to whether the sanctification of the land under Joshua was a permanent one and applied ever after, or whether it was a temporary sanctification and it took the second settlement under Ezra to establish permanence.

After the Babylonian exile, there was, possibly, the only period, however brief, in which no Jews lived in Israel at all. The Assyrians had already destroyed the Northern Kingdom in 722 B.C.E. and the Babylonians took away the upper and the skilled citizens classes in the two conquests of Judea in 597 and 586 B.C.E. They left the poor behind under the Babylonian appointee as governor, Gedalia. Gedalia was assassinated by a rival and the remnant population fled to Egypt, fearing reprisals. Perhaps this is the significance of the Fast of Gedalia after Rosh Hashana. It was not just to record Jewish internecine wrangling and the murder of a good man, but also the only time that there were no Jews at all in the Land of Israel.

The question of the sanctity of the borders was relevant, primarily for issues of agriculture and tithes. But it was also important for all of those commandments which applied to the Land of Israel, the agricultural laws, the festivals and the calendar. Before the universal calendars were fixed by calculation, dates and times were fixed by sighting the moon and fixing the time of the New Month. Once the Beth Din or the Sanhedrin agreed on the times, bonfires were lit to carry the message throughout Israel and then on to the Diaspora (until internal sectarianism led opponents to destroy the system by setting off false alarms). Israel was vital not just because of the Temple and its service on behalf of all Jews wherever they lived, but also because of its importance as the only authority for deciding issues of the calendar which would affect the practice and the cohesion of the overall Jewish community. After the Babylonian exile the majority of Jews no longer lived in Israel. Babylon, then Egypt, and later Rome, held greater numbers. But until the calendar was fixed, Israel retained its centrality in this sphere.

The main rivalry for authority throughout the Talmudic period was between Babylon and Israel (or Judea or Palestine or Jerusalem, the names were often interchangeable). This competition was based on the issue of who could best protect and nurture Torah study and affiliation. While the Temple was still functioning there was no question but that religious authority was vested in the Temple and in the courts surrounding it. However the Babylonian academies became more and more powerful and exercised an increasing amount of halachic autonomy and decision making. During the Temple period and the century afterwards, the academies of Jerusalem were still the elite ones. Hillel moved from Babylon to Israel to study and eventually become the Spiritual Head of the Community. It was only after Rabbi Yehuda the Prince, and the decline of Jerusalem Jewry following the Bar Cochba revolution, that the Babylonian community moved from an inferior to a superior position religiously and academically, with its powerful yeshivot at Sura, Pumbedita, Machoza, and Nehardea. The Position of Exilarch, Resh Galuta, was a venerable one that traced its history back to the first exile and it paralleled the Nasi, the Head of the Jerusalem community. Both traced their lineage to King David. There are examples of even Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi in Israel deferring to Rav Huna the Exilarch in Babylon.

The Babylonian community slowly overtook the declining Palestinian communities and grew in authority during the first five hundred years of the millennium. So much so that the Babylonian Talmud was accepted as the major source text over the Yerushalmi that was completed much earlier and was less comprehensive. This digression is to set the scene to explain the tension and conflict that is found in the Talmud over the issue of whether settling in Israel is an obligation, a requirement, of Jewish Law or not.

3

Quite apart from the agricultural laws which logically and with textual authority apply only to the Land of Israel, there are a series of laws in the Talmud that emphasize the importance of living in Israel. "Everybody (in a man's household) can be made to go up to the Land of Israel but not everyone can be made to leave. The same thing applies to males as it does to females."

The Gemara expands on this. "If he wants to go up (to Israel) and she does not, he can force her to go up with him; otherwise she forfeits her marriage settlement (Ketuba). If she wants to go up and he does not, he is forced to go up. And if he does not want to he is forced to divorce her but he must pay her settlement. If she wants to leave (Israel) and he does not, we force her not to leave, but if not she is divorced without a settlement. If he wants to leave and she does not, he is forced to stay and if not he is forced to divorce her and she is given her settlement."

Interestingly, Maimonides understands the implication of this Mishna's statement about "everyone in a man's household", to mean that "A slave who wants to go up to live in Israel (one assumes for religious reasons) can force his master to go up with him." The commentators on the Gemara argue as to whether this is a Jewish or a non-Jewish slave. A slave had obligations to keep Torah commandments that were not related to time. But this obligation only applied in the Land of Israel. Hence the Mishna, "If one sells a slave to a non-Jew or to a Jew who lives outside the Land of Israel, the slave automatically goes free."

The Rabbis declared that the land outside Israel was ritually impure. Official reasons given were that generally the dead were buried at random and there was no way of knowing what ground was ritually pure and what was not. It has been have suggested that this was an economic measure to protect the potteries of Israel from foreign competition. Restrictive practices and trade barriers were as much part of the economic realities two thousand years ago as they are today. But it is probable that this was also a way of differentiating between Israel and the Diaspora, underlining the special status of Israel both in regard to vessels used for ritual purposes and, indeed, for burial. There is a very ancient tradition of either being sent for burial in Israel, where one is buried directly into the ground without a coffin, or to place some soil from Israel in the coffin of those buried outside.

In addition to the legal issues, of which these are no more than a few samples, there are a lot of Rabbinic exhortations concerning the importance of living in Israel. "Living in Israel is as important as all of the other commandments in the Torah," "A person should always live in the Land of Israel, even in a city where most of the inhabitants are idol worshippers, rather than living outside Israel, even in a city where most of the inhabitants are Jewish, because whoever lives in Israel it is as though they have a God and whoever lives outside Israel it is as though they have no God," "Rabbi Abahu said, 'Even a Canaanite maidservant who lives in the Land of Israel is guaranteed to have a place in The World To Come,'" "Whoever walks four amot (paces) in the Land of Israel is guaranteed a place in the Next World," "Whoever is buried in the Land of Israel it is as though they were buried underneath the altar (in the Temple)." These are just a selection of statements to be found in the Talmud about the importance of the Land of Israel. There is even a suggestion that "The air of the Land of Israel makes a person wiser." In fact, the rabbis of Israel thought themselves in general to be brighter and sharper intellectually than the Babylonians whom they also criticized for wearing fancy clothes to bolster up their images. They also thought their relations with other rabbis were far superior to those of the "barbaric" Babylonians. The very hyperbolic wording of these statements shows the strength of feelings on this issue.

The Babylonians countered with their own statements. "Rabbi Yehuda said, 'Whoever goes up to Israel from Babylon goes against a positive command.'" "Rabbi Yehuda said, 'It is forbidden to leave Babylon to go up to other lands.'" Nevertheless, the fact that prayers were directed towards Israel, and the fact that special prayers for Israel were part of the universal format of the Amidah prayer, all go to show the absolutely crucial place of the Land of Israel in Jewish ritual and thinking. This, of course, even before the exile made the return to Zion perhaps the most important feature of Jewish life in the Diaspora. One has only to read the poetry of Yehuda HaLevy or follow the dramatic pilgrimage of Nachmanides to realize how essential the dream of returning to Zion was to the Jews of all communities during the long dark exile.

4

The miraculous re-establishment of the State of Israel in this century has raised the question of whether there is a religious obligation to return to settle in Israel. Halachically the authorities are divided. Maimonides does not include the issue in his list of the Biblical commands, in his Sefer HaMitzvot. Nachmanides, Ramban, includes the obligation to live in Israel as one of the 613 Torah commands. In his additional notes to Maimonides' list he says, "We were commanded to inherit the land which God gave our fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, and we should not leave it to any other one of the nations or leave it abandoned…this is a command that applies to all generations and every individual is obliged to try to carry out this command, even nowadays in exile."

In his commentary on the Torah, Nachmanides says, "'And you will inherit the land and dwell upon it for I have given it to you as an inheritance.' It is my opinion that that this is a positive command that they were commanded to settle in the Land of Israel and to take it over because it was given to them." But Rashi understands this to mean simply that they should drive out the inhabitants. It means, according to him, simply that if you are able to, you will live there, and if not, you will not be able to carry this out. And, yet, going even further, Nachmanides says that all the commandments of the Torah were given to be kept in Israel. The only obligation to keep them outside Israel is in order that they should not be forgotten.

It is fair to say that most authorities do not believe there is a religious obligation to settle in Israel, ideal or important as it may be. There is a strong body of opinion that believes that it is wrong to go up in any force. They base themselves on the Talmudic tradition that God made three binding vows at the moment of exile, "One was that Israel would not return to the land by force. One was that the Holy One Blessed Be He made Israel swear that they would not rebel against the nations of the world. And one was that God made the nations swear that they would not oppress Israel more than necessary." This is the source of those Hassidism who object to Zionism, not just on the grounds that the movement is a secular one, but that setting up a Jewish state ahead of the Messiah goes against the will of God. Nevertheless, throughout the time of the Diaspora Jews kept on trying, albeit in small numbers, to settle in Israel. The small numbers simply reflected the economic and political realities. The land was hardly able to sustain the few settlers it had. The small Jewish communities of Jerusalem and Safed were poor and exposed. The Ottoman Empire was not well-disposed to a massive influx of Europeans. The episode of the seventeenth century false messiah Shabbetai Zvi shows both how eager European Jews were to pick up and move and, equally, how defensive the Turkish powers were, and how reluctant to permit an invasion. In the nineteenth century, the campaign to re-settle in Israel grew in strength primarily because pressure brought to bear by the Western European powers began to force open, however unpredictably, the gates of Palestine. The movement to settle in Israel was a movement that benefited from a rise in nationalistic sentiment. There were outstanding Orthodox rabbis who supported those movements, like the Hovevei Zion, who actively worked to send youngsters to Israel, despite the hardships imposed by Turkish rule, men like Rabbi Samuel Moholiver of Bialystock (1824- 1898) who was associated with Hovevei Zion, and many others who stood apart from affiliation to any specific movement.

Most Orthodox rabbis opposed the political movement that became known as Zionism, not so much for halachic reasons as religious ones. Zionism as people like Herzl envisioned it, and as the majority of its early activists believed, would replace the old religious values associated with ghetto life, attitudes that characterized the Exile. Herzl's "Jewish State", written during the Dreyfuss manifestation of Anti-Semitism in France, sought to "solve the Jewish problem" rather than enhance Jewish religion or culture. Most, not all, of the original philosophers of Zionism certainly saw Zionism as an alternative to Judaism. This was one of the reasons why when the British Government offered the Zionists a home in Uganda in 1903, many voted for the proposal. There were, indeed, conflicting voices like that of Ahad Ha'am who argued for the centrality of Jewishness in Zionism, but his heirs in the Revisionist movement were, for most of the century, outvoted. Hence the famous debate between Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister, and Hadassah over whether Zionism requires one to settle in Israel. Ben Gurion argued that living in Israel was the fulfillment of the Zionist dream (regardless of whether one lived as a Jew or not). For him Zionism rather than Judaism was the supreme ideal. This upset the many supporters of Zionism who lived in America and had no intention of moving away from the United States however strongly they supported a Jewish State.

Religious Zionism sought to combine both the idealism and the practical nationalism of Zionism with a commitment to Judaism. Out of this came the insistence that a "good Jew", a "good Zionist" can only live in Israel. If during the two thousand years of exile more Jews did not go to Israel, it was not because they were not required to. It was because they could not, for political or economic realities. Now that the situation has changed, there is no reason why a Jew who wants to adhere to the Jewish religion should not go to live in Israel. Certainly, the re-conquest of the West Bank after the Six Day War in 1967 gave an added religious dimension to settlement on land that had been more integral to historical Jewish settlement in Israel than many parts of the new Jewish State.

I would argue that Israel has been the powerhouse behind the revival of Judaism post-Holocaust and even with the present kulturkampf between Orthodox and non-Orthodox there is more Torah learning and academic scholarship in Israel than in the rest of the Jewish world combined and more. The fact is, however, that it is impossible to claim, unchallenged, that Jewish Law requires settlement in Israel. It may encourage it. It may be that only in Israel can one fulfill all the available Torah commandments open to us. But throughout Jewish history many Jews have lived outside Israel. Once again, the variety and differences of opinion within halacha make one absolute statement impossible.

Without doubt the Land of Israel is vital to Jewish religious life. It is one of the "three strands that cannot easily be broken". It is, together with God and Torah, what defines the Jewish people and the Jewish religion. In prayer and in study and in practice it is central. However, the issue is whether one has an obligation, as opposed to a desire, to settle in Israel and this is another matter.

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