By Rabbi Carl M. Perkins:

Truth: A Grievous Casualty
Haye Sarah 2002
November 2, 2002 

 There is a scholar from the Rabbinic period that I would really like to have met: Rabbi Yudan, the son of Rabbi Simon. I don’t know very much about him, but he apparently lived in the fourth century of the Common Era in the Land of Israel. At that time, Israel was under Roman rule, and that rule was oppressive.

Moreover, although many Jews continued to live in the Land in which the Jews had lived for well over a thousand years, our claim to the Land was seriously challenged. After all, the name of the country had been changed by the Romans from its previous name, Judea—the land of the Jews—to Palestina, or Palestine—the land not of the Jews, but of the Philistines—reflecting, not very subtly, that, as far as the Romans were concerned, we Jews didn’t have the right to call that Land our own anymore—if we ever did.

A name change is a powerful, political step. The city that had been our capital, Jerusalem, had also experienced a name change. The city had been destroyed in the year 70 and leveled to the ground. About sixty years later, in the year 130 C.E., the Emperor Hadrian decided to establish a Roman colony on the ruins of the city and he renamed the city Aelia Capitolina, in honor of his family name and the Capitoline triad [of Roman deities], Jupiter, Juno and Minerva. That audacious decision helped spark a rebellion by the Jews, during which the Romans were forced to evacuate Jerusalem for three years. When that rebellion was finally suppressed, the Romans forbade the Jews, henceforth, from living in the city. During the subsequent centuries, Jews were prohibited even from entering the city with one exception: one day a year, on the 9th of Av (the day on which, even today, we commemorate the destruction of the Temple), they were allowed to enter and to recite lamentations on the Temple Mount.

In the middle of the fourth century, it must have seemed absurd to claim that the Land of Israel was the homeland of the Jewish nation, when Greek-speaking Romans and other peoples lived wherever they wished, while Jews did not. And yet that is exactly what the rabbis persisted in doing! They insisted that we Jews remind ourselves constantly, every time we pray, that: the country has been destroyed by the Romans, the City of Jerusalem had been burnt to the ground, and many Judeans (Jews) had been exiled from the Land of Israel, our rightful home, and from the holy city of Jerusalem.

But they also insisted that we remind ourselves that eventually we would return. And the rabbis saw it as their mission to draw our attention to every place in the Torah where it was made clear that, whoever the subsequent masters of political power in the land might be, this land had been, and deserved once more to be, a Jewish country.

It is in this context that Rabbi Yudan, in a midrash preserved in Bereshit Rabbah, makes what is, in retrospect, a fascinating claim. He says the following:

However much the gentile nations (by which he meant Rome) might argue with our claim to the Land of Israel, surely they wouldn’t act so low as to deny our claim to three particular places which the Bible assures us belong to us. (B.R. 79:7) And what are these three places?

First, there is the Cave of Machpelah. That is the cave, in the city of Hebron, where the patriarchs and matriarchs (most of them, at least) are buried. That’s the cave mentioned in our parashah, the place that Abraham purchased from Ephon the Hittite as a burial ground for his wife, Sarah. (Genesis 23:16) The text takes pains to point out that Abraham didn’t take that land, he didn’t chase Ephron off of it; he purchased the land at its full price of 400 shekels of silver. Given that, Rabbi Yudan tells us, how could anyone claim that it doesn’t belong to Abraham’s descendants?

The second place our rights over which surely no one would ever contest is the Temple Mount. Rabbi Yudan reminds us that in the Book of Chronicles (I: 21) we are told that King David paid full price for the land on which the Temple would eventually be built. The description of the transaction parallels the negotiations between Abraham and Ephron in our parashah. King David says to Ornan the Jebusite, “Let me have your threshing floor so that I can build an altar on it. Give it to me for the full price.” Ornan replies, “Take it! You’re the king. Do what you’d like! I’ll even give you oxen for burnt offerings, and wheat for the meal offering; I will give you whatever you need.” But King David said, “No. I will buy it for the full price.” And so, the text goes on to tell us, “David gave to Ornan six hundred shekels of gold by weight.” It therefore figures, doesn’t it, that no one would ever challenge our claim to that site!

Finally, Rabbi Yudan points out that the place where our ancestor Joseph was buried, the “Tomb of Joseph” would likewise always be viewed as belonging to the Jewish people. Why was he so sure? As a reminder, the Book of Genesis tells us that Joseph died in Egypt, but that, before he died, he made his brothers swear to him that, if ever they or their descendants would be permitted to leave Egypt, they would take his bones with them. (Genesis 50:24-25) They agreed and, we are told, they embalmed Joseph and put him in a coffin to await that day.

In the beginning of parashat Beshalach in the book of Exodus, (Exodus 13: 19), as the people are leaving Egypt, Moses stops to pick up Joseph’s bones on the way out of Egypt. And the people take those bones with them all the way into the Promised Land.

Whatever happened to them? After all, Moses died before reaching the land! At the very end of the Book of Joshua, we’re told what happened to them. We’re told that Joshua died, and that the people buried him on his own property, in the Land. One might think that the Book of Joshua would end right there. But it doesn’t. It goes on to tell us that the children of Israel then buried the bones of Joseph in the city of Shekhem, in a section of ground that Jacob had bought from the city elders (the sons of Hamor, the father of Shekhem) for a hundred qesita. (Joshua 24:32). Given this carefully presented Biblical chain of custody, who would ever challenge our claim to the Tomb of Joseph?

Viewed from the perspective of the year 2002, Rabbi Yudan’s midrash seems, unfortunately, very, very wrong. After all, during the past several years, one hundred years after Jews began to return in large numbers to our ancestral homeland, we’ve seen the Jewish right to ownership over these three places—precisely these three places—be very seriously challenged.

Take, for example, the cave of Machpelah. It’s in the middle of the city of Hebron, which has been under Palestinian control for several years now. It is true that Jews supposedly have the right to enter and to pray at the Cave—but only because of a huge group of soldiers. The tensions there are so high—naturally, given the intensity of the conflict—that few venture there. There’s no question that among the Palestinians, there’s much more resentment than acceptance of the right of Jews to be there.

The Temple Mount is likewise essentially off limits to Jews. As we all know, when Ariel Sharon decided to take a walk there two years ago, riots broke out. More significantly, the rhetoric coming out of the Palestinian Authority denies that there was ever a Jewish Temple on the site—though it recognizes the right of Jews to pray at what the Palestinians sometimes continue to refer to as the Wailing Wall.

Finally, I’m sure that many of us remember the incident that took place last year when Palestinians overwhelmed an Israeli unit defending Joseph’s Tomb. The Tomb was overrun and physically demolished by rioters who vowed that a mosque would be built over the site. The upshot: No more visits to Joseph’s Tomb.

The conflict between Israel and her neighbors is complicated and disturbing, and there are many victims of that conflict. Many lives, both innocent and not, have been lost. There has been much suffering. But of all the casualties of that conflict, there is one that sometimes gets less attention than it deserves and about which I’d like to say a few words. Of all the casualties of the on-going conflict for control of the Land of Israel, one particularly grievous one is truth itself.

Of all the horrible things that Israel is suffering from these days—the relentless suicide attacks, the constant threat of terrorism—to me one of the most upsetting is the delegitimization of our people’s claim to the Land of Israel. It’s as if we Jews never lived in the Land, never held it sacred, never lived there in cities and towns, never built a nation there. Our desire to re-establish our national sovereignty there is depicted as fraudulent; it is seen as merely an effort to subdue others, not a national liberation movement arising out of our defeat at the hands of the powerful Roman Empire.

Why is this? How could it be that we, as a people are so grossly misunderstood? Rabbi Yudan wouldn’t have been able to understand it! For him, our claim to the Land—at least to certain parts of it—was obvious, and not only to him, but to others as well.

We might think there is a simple reason for this lack of respect. Perhaps it stems from the discomfort, in the modern world, to point to this or that verse in the Bible to give this people or that one legitimacy. And maybe that’s not so terrible. After all, we are skeptical, in the modern world, of such “revealed” real estate claims from ancient scriptures, whether they be contained in the Bible or the Koran, or elsewhere. No verse in the Bible is going to give Israel votes in the Security Council—and maybe we don’t expect and don’t even want it to.

And yet, I don’t think that’s the issue. For the Palestinians are not only willing to dismiss the Bible as the source of the legitimacy of our claims to the Land of Israel, they are also willing to dismiss history. When the leader of the Palestinian Authority has the audacity to claim that the Jewish Temple—that is, the central religious, political, administrative and judicial institution of the Jewish Commonwealth—did not exist on the Temple Mount, and he is not seriously challenged by anyone in his community, that’s a sign that we are living in an Orwellian universe, where truth has lost its value. And that is very dangerous.

But that shouldn’t surprise us. Nothing should be surprising in a world in which Holocaust revisionists—that is, those who deny that the Holocaust ever took place—remain popular writers. Nothing should surprise us when we learn that in Egypt, a television series based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is about to be aired.

Pirkei Avot teaches us that the world rests on three foundations: justice, peace and truth. In pursuing peace, in the Middle East as elsewhere, we must, of course, seek justice for all, but we must also not lose sight of that precious value of truth, without which there can be no justice and no peace.

We must be vigilant in our pursuit of and our dissemination of the truth. We need to let the world know what we know to be true. We should never retreat from our pursuit of the truth. I have no hesitation exploring or discussing the historicity of the Biblical narratives. Some of them, I’m well aware, may not be entirely historically accurate.

But I also have no hesitation discussing the historicity of the Second Temple period, when our people were in possession of the Land of Israel. Neither should any of us.

We have a job to do. If we care about Israel, if we care about the safety, the security, the future of the six million inhabitants of Israel, then, among our many responsibilities is to challenge misinformation and disinformation, to challenge the often unfounded claims against Israel, and to defend Israel’s right to exist.

It is by no means certain that Israel will continue to exist. Having studied Rabbi Yudan’s midrash, and come to see how willing so many nations in the world are to dismiss our claims to this site or to that, I would not be surprised if further challenges against our claims are yet to come. After all, if our rights to Hebron (generally referred to as “the Palestinian city of Hebron”), Jerusalem (usually referred to as “Arab East Jerusalem” in the press) and Joseph’s tomb in Shechem (now called Nablus) are to be dismissed, how strong are our claims to Tel Aviv, Netanya or Kiryat Bialik? How can settlements less than a hundred years old be given greater legitimacy than two or three thousand year old claims that have been dismissed?

Let me conclude on a hopeful note. There’s another midrash taught in the name of Rabbi Yudan that I want to share with you.

Rabbi Yudan tells us the following: “the redemption [of our people] will not come at one time, but little by little.” Deliverance, he says, is compared to the dawn as it is said, “Then shall your light break forth as the dawn” (Isaiah 58:8). Why? Because, he says, there is no greater darkness than the hour closest to dawn. If the sun were to appear suddenly at that moment, all creatures would be blinded. Therefore, first the pillar of dawn rises and gives light to the world and then, little by little it gets brighter until the sun appears. (See midrash on Psalms 18:36)

It is painfully true that there are those who would like to take our past away from us. We must not allow them to do that. Each of us must stand firmly together, in pursuit of that value which, according to our tradition, is the seal which God uses when He, as it were, signs his name: truth. May we hold fast to truth and, standing firm, may we greet the dawn of our redemption.

Amen.