I first met Rabbi Moshe Levinger, z”tzal, some 35 years ago in New York. At the time, I was heading the U.S. office of the Volunteer for Israel/Sarel campaign to bring volunteers to Israel. At the same time, I was doing public relations for the Aliyah Center of the Jewish Agency on Park Avenue. One day, Rabbi Levinger walked into my small office, along with eight other energetic settler-types, including Era Rappaport, Yaacov Sternberg, Yechiel Leiter, and Rabbi Benny Alon. They had arrived in New York City to spearhead the “Mivtza Elef” campaign, initiated by Rabbi Levinger, to bring 1000 American Jewish families on Aliyah to settlements in Judea and Samaria. While the English speakers in the contingent explained the project to me, Rabbi Levinger sat silently in the background, reading a thin, white book which he carried with him wherever he went. The book, Rabbi Kook’s classic treatise, “Orot,” was, for him, as inseparable as tefillin. Throughout the decades that I knew him, he would invariably pull the tattered book out of his bulky leather briefcase and study it during meetings, while driving throughout the country, at weddings, wherever he happened to be. He studied it again and again, hundreds of times, encouraging me to translate the book and write a commentary in English.
During that first meeting, in his deep, hoarse voice, he read out the very first sentence of the book in Hebrew and asked his followers to explain it to me: “The Land of Israel is not a peripheral matter, an external acquisition of the Nation…. “ He explained that Eretz Yisrael was much more than a ten-day vacation to Israel to bolster Jewish identity; it was much more than doing a month of volunteer work to feel like an Israeli; it was much more than the Israel concert and parade in New York. Eretz Yisrael, he said, with increasing passion in his voice and fire in his eyes, was the foundation of Am Yisrael and Torah. Without the Land of Israel, the Jewish People are scattered nomads with a handful of private commandments like Shabbat and kashrut, but lacking all of the Torah’s true national grandeur and strength.
I was immediately intrigued by his words. In those days, I was at the beginning of my way back to Torah and Israel. I didn’t know Hebrew; I was just beginning to read the Bible; my identity was American through and through. But now I was hearing that I really belonged to a different Nation and a different Land. To a Jewish Nation and a Jewish Land. Eretz Yisrael wasn’t just another facet of Judaism – it was the foundation upon which all of the Torah is based!
I wrote an article for the “Jewish Press” about “Mivtzah Elef” and helped the group by setting up lectures for them in different shuls in New York. Each time I was with Rabbi Levinger he would peer at me with his “Mount Sinai” eyes and read me another sentence or two from “Orot,” as if he had chosen me to be its purveyor to the English-speaking world, which I was later privileged to do through the commentaries I wrote with Rabbi David Samson. http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3Atzvi%20fishman
Rabbi Kook writes: “It is impossible for a Jew to be faithful and true to his contemplations, thoughts, understandings, and imagination, when he is outside the Land of Israel, in comparison to their faithfulness in Eretz Yisrael.” Rabbi Levinger explained that Jews in the Diaspora think they are American, or Frenchmen, or Germans, because true thinking for a Jew in the exile is impossible in foreign lands. I was only an American, I realized, because I was born there and raised to believe that I was a son of George Washington and Uncle Sam. But I was really a part of the Children of Israel, an Israelite, who had been exiled long ago from my true Land. The Diaspora was a temporary punishment. The Land of Israel was my true home!
On innumerable occasions, I learned “Orot” with Rabbi Levinger. Always, in his presence, I felt I wasn’t doing enough to spread the message. He lived, breathed, and sacrificed all comforts to increase the settlement of Eretz Yisrael, 24 hours a day, and I was, in comparison, almost standing still.
With his passing, we all have to increase our efforts in the conquest and settlement of our Homeland. May his memory be for a blessing.