Who can be deaf? The voice of our Beloved is insistent and expects us to listen as He guides Providence in this direction. He asks us to cast our lot in with the collective Jewish people, to examine our provincial needs and see them as petty preferences that should be abandoned in favor of joining with our people who come from all countries of the Diaspora, all backgrounds, to a common land.
How pleasant it is for the Moroccan Jew and the American Jew and the Argentinian Jew to be living side by side as Israelis! How deeply satisfying to raise one’s children in the streets of Jerusalem and see them married and setting up their homes in the cities of Judea! How sweet to call oneself a ben Eretz Yisrael rather than a Diaspora Jew!
Woe is to him who refuses to even consider accepting the gift.
Our sages use the term “shidduch” to describe the relationship that Hashem envisioned between His People and His Land; the two are joined together in the most profound of ways. Much as a woman is bound to a man in the deepest sense of possession, so too does the Jewish people possess Eretz Yisrael, in a way that no other nation will ever possess its indigenous territory.
Kalev ben Yefuneh of the tribe of Judah understood this as he set out for Me’arat haMachpelah in Chevron. This marked the site of the first unequivocal statement of ownership of the Land made by Avraham when he purchased the cave as a burial site for his family. Avraham understood, of course, that his most profound kinyan, his beloved wife, Sarah, required interment in a possession equally as deep – that of his bond to the Land Hashem had bequeathed to him as his everlasting inheritance. So Kalev went straight to Chevron as the other spies traversed the land, for he understood that whatever report might be returned to the eager population, the fact that this land belonged to him was unchangeable.
The story of Kalev resounds deeply in all of us who visit the contemporary State of Israel and wonder at the strange sensation of belonging in a land where many of us do not yet live. It is this unmatched sense of nachat ruach – tranquility of the soul – that must be part of the reward for those who have done what they believe is the right thing to do.
Our first weeks back in Israel will hopefully follow the significant journey from a visit to Me’arat haMachpelah, where our strongest ties to Eretz Yisrael are founded, on to the Kotel, where we shall show our children the holiness that can be found nowhere else on this earth, and finally into our home on a small yishuv, where we hope to build the future of our people. I pray that every one of us merits finding such intense purpose and meaning in our lives.
