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Zionism and the Myth of Motherland

By Assaf Sagiv

In adopting a modernistic approach to the land of Israel, Zionism’s fathers passed up Judaism’s unique relationship to the land.


Why does the Bible reject the autochthonous myth for the people of Israel? The answer lies in the Bible’s rejection of the broader worldview which the myth reflects—a mythological-matriarchal conception of nature. In this worldview, man experiences nature as an all-embracing mother, upon whose graces he is utterly dependent. “Motherland” is the archetypal female: Mother of all living things, bearer of the keys to birth, death and regeneration. The fertility and mystery rituals of the ancient world’s religions expressed a longing for a bridge between man and wild, primeval nature. They sought to demonstrate the organic connection between human existence and the living, breathing essence of the world. These rituals afforded their initiates a glimpse into the cycles of death and regeneration of the universe, and the opportunity to unite once again with the great mother earth.
In the biblical view, these rituals were an abomination, to be wiped off the face of the earth. This attitude stems not only from a moral revulsion to the violence and licentiousness many of them entailed but, first and foremost, from a rejection of the worldview they reflected. As stressed repeatedly in the Bible, the source of grace and bounty is not the living earth, but the living God, who stands above nature. This belief is the basis for many commandments in the Tora, such as giving to the poor the gleanings from the forgotten sheaves and corners of the fields, as well as bringing tithes and expropriating lands to establish cities for the Levites and the priests. Perhaps the most explicit articulation of this idea appears in the explication of the laws of the Sabbatical and Jubilee years: “The land shall not be sold for ever, for the land is mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with me.”7 Put another way, the land does not belong to humans. Nor does its value derive from being an independent, divine entity: The land is valuable because it is consecrated to God.
Moreover, the Bible rejects outright the notion that a person or nation can have full ownership of a land. The true master of the entire world is God, who, in his benevolence, divides up the land and allocates portions of it to the various nations as he sees fit: “When the Most High gave nations their homes / And set the divisions of man / He fixed the boundaries of peoples / In relation to Israel’s numbers.”8 In other words, not only the Hebrews, but all peoples were given their boundaries by God. Thus, in the story of the Israelite conquest of the areas east of the Jordan River, God warns Moses that the children of Israel must not take for themselves the lands of the Moabites and the Ammonites, “For I will not give you any of their land as a possession, because I have given it as a possession to the children of Lot.”9 And any human inhabitants of the land, even if they are autochthonous peoples, may be replaced according to the decision of God:
That, too, is considered Refa’im country. Refa’im used to dwell there—the Ammonites called them Zamzumim, a people great and numerous and as tall as the Anakites. The Eternal destroyed them before [the Ammonites]; they dispossessed them and settled in their place. So he did for the children of Esau who live in Se’ir, when he destroyed the Horites before them, so that they dispossessed them and settled in their place, as is still the case.10
The Bible does not regard autochthony as any basis for territorial right or privilege. Quite the contrary: The biblical text goes out of its way to refute the validity of autochthony in light of the divine will.
The recognition that “the earth is the Eternal’s and all that it holds, the world and its inhabitants,”11 then, is the basis for understanding the Jewish claim to the land of Israel. This claim derives from a divine promise, the product of the covenant between Abraham and God:
I will make you exceedingly fertile, and make nations of you, and kings shall come forth from you. I will maintain my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you, as an everlasting covenant throughout the ages, to be a God for you and your offspring to come. I give to you and your offspring after you the land in which you sojourn, all the land of Canaan, as an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.12 
Particularly striking is the fact that here, as in many other places, the Bible refers to the promised land as the “land of Canaan,” recalling the name of its former inhabitants. This serves as a kind of reminder—as well as a warning. The land is consecrated to God, and consequently must be treated with respect. Whoever dwells there must live according to a particular moral code, the violation of which entails severe punishment: “Thus the land became defiled, and I called it to account for its iniquity, and the land spat out its inhabitants. But you must keep my laws and my rules, and you must not do any of those abhorrent things.... That the land not spit you out for defiling it, as it spat out the nation that came before you.”13 
The prophet Jeremiah similarly offers the reason for God’s imminent wrath against his people: “I brought you to this country of farmland, to enjoy its fruit and its bounty. But you came and defiled my land; you turned my inheritance into an abomination.”14 From these and other, similar verses, we learn that the inhabitants’ moral responsibility towards the land stems not only from the unique religious destiny of the people of Israel, as expressed by the giving of the Tora at Sinai, but also from the very fact of their dwelling on sacred land, land which belongs to God.15 
 
Clearly, then, the Bible rejects the notion of an organic, unmediated connection between a people and its land. Still, it does not take issue with the basic idea of territory; instead, it offers a unique doctrine, one which anchors the Hebrews’ territorial rights to the land of Israel in a decree by the supreme divine authority—and in that alone. This is clearly expressed in the eleventh-century commentary of Rashi on the first verse of the Tora: “In the beginning God created—R. Yitzhak says: Should the Tora not have begun with the verse ‘This month shall mark for you the beginning of the months,’ which is the first commandment given to Israel?16 Why did it begin with ‘In the beginning’?” And the answer: “That if the peoples of the world should say to Israel, ‘You are thieves, for you conquered the lands of the seven nations [the Hittites, the Parizites, the Emorites, the Canaanites, the Jebusites, the Girgashites, and the Hivvites],’ Israel may reply to them, ‘All the earth belongs to the Holy One, and he gave it to whomever he pleased. When he so willed it, he gave it to them; and when he so willed it, he took it from them and gave it to us.’”17
Yet the same theological-political logic which provides the moral justification for the Israelites’ conquest of the land also places a sword of Damocles over their heads, in the form of the threat of exile. Exile is the punishment for flouting the moral code which obligates the inhabitants of the land in general, and the Jews, as the chosen people, in particular. Exile is more than expulsion from one’s territory: It is the severing of a people’s connection with the world, and the withdrawal of divine grace from the nation.
A catastrophe of this order, a disgrace that amounts to an existential crisis, can cast doubt on the very continuation of the collective Jewish identity. How is Jewish existence possible after banishment from grace? The biblical worldview suggests a strategy for coping: Instead of regarding exile as the annulment of the divine promise, it should be understood as its confirmation, its grim fulfillment. The exile is a lesson which can be understood only in the context of a breach of the contract between the people and their God. This is the causality which drives Jewish history; this is its excruciating consistency. Thus, in his commentary on the book of Genesis, Nahmanides writes: “This is the eternal law of God: After God had expelled from the land the nations which had revolted against him, he installed his servants in it, as they knew that through service they would inherit it; and that if they sinned ... the land would spit them out, as it spat out the nation which preceded them.”18 
The Bible presents the possibility of exile as a permanent threat against the land’s inhabitants. The destruction of the First Temple, and the establishment and subsequent destruction of the Second Temple, in no way undermined this line of thought in Jewish theology; to no small degree these events actually reinforced it. After the destruction of the Second Temple, the rabbis took for granted that the calamity was the result of Jewish wrongdoing. One mishnaic statement posits that “Exile comes into the world by virtue of idolatry, forbidden sexual relations, bloodshed and the desecration of the Sabbatical year.”19 The Mishna and Talmud contain many similar declarations regarding the grounds for destruction and redemption. As illustrated by the above statements of Rashi and Nahmanides—who lived a millennium after the Temple was destroyed—the belief in the contingency of man’s link to the land continued to be a basic assumption of Jewish tradition, even over the course of many generations in exile.20 


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