Behukotai: No automatic promise of land
We’re not the Chosen People just by virtue of our forefathers; Leviticus warns the land will vomit us out, too, if we continue to be stiff-necked and evil
However, here and there, the book interjects topics that apply to us, the simple people. One of these topics appears at the head of this week’s Torah portion, Behukotai (“in accordance with My laws”), and deals with the complicated relationship among the Chosen People, God and the Land of Israel.
In the opening verses, God presents the simplest and most generous of offers: If we behave as we are supposed to then not even the sky is the limit to God’s generosity.
But there’s a downside: If you break the covenant, I, God, will not follow through on My commitment. The verses go on to elaborate a frightening list of punishments and plagues that would fall without respite on our heads - here and in the exile.
It’ll be a very personal, no-holds-barred grudge match between God and the Jewish People.
What is the significance of this covenant? What are these verses, stuck in the middle of details about sacrifices, supposed to teach us? It seems that there’s no eternal guarantee to this holy land.
Still, the Land of Israel is our destination and our only land. True, we do not dream of any other place in the world. But out presence in the land is neither eternal nor automatic.
Rather, our presence in the land is intimately connected with our moral behavior (our treatment of the stranger, widow and orphan) as a nation.
The limits of choseness
If we act wickedly towards the stranger; turn our heads from the poverty of the orphan, and stuff our ears to the cries of the widow, then the land will vomit us out - just as it had done to so many nations before us.
When life is not lived morally, there’s no difference between Jews and Amorites, between Israelis and Canaanites, Romans or Crusaders.
Every time the land tries to vomit us out, it’s incumbent upon us to figure out what have we violated in the covenant.
The hassidim of the Greater Land of Israel movement should ask themselves in what way their zealotry, which gave expression to our distorted and unjust existence in the land, was a violation of the covenant.
Because of their superfluous zealotry, we are being punished and expelled from part of the land - perhaps to be given another chance to save what’s left of Israel and its society.
- Weekly Torah portion commentary by former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg, a onetime Labor Party leader, is presented in collaboration with the radio program, “Mishal in the Morning”
