Parshat Masai Rabbi Chaim Brovender

Let us learn a posuk with Rashi

"And you shall drive out the inhabitants of the land... ...You shall rid the land [of them] and settle in it, for to you I have given the land to possess it..." (33: 52,53).

Referring to the native population of the land of Canaan, the word vehorashtem means "you shall drive them out." Rashi explains the verb twice. In verse 52, he notes that vehorashtem means: "you shall drive out". Again in verse 53, Rashi notes: "you shall rid it of its inhabitants, and then you shall settle in it... [so that] ...You will be able to remain in it, and if not, you shall not be able to remain in it."

For Rashi, the intention of the verses is clear. Conquest, inheritance, and the division of the land among the tribes, will not establish a permanent change: the land of Canaan will not transform into the land of Yisrael. For that change, the culture and the spirit in the land must be that of the Torah. It certainly cannot be that of the usurped culture. This problem, ensuring the durability of the conquest, is mentioned in these verses in a straightforward manner. The conquest will not endure if the spirit of the people who reside therein does not answer to their singular responsibility.

The Ramban uses this verse as the basis of a special mitzvah to live in the land of Yisrael [Sefer Hamizvot, end of positive commandment 4].

This position can be explained as follows. The mitzvah to go to Eretz Yisrael, to live there, is not about moving horizontally from one place on earth to a second. The mitzvah includes safeguarding our presence in the land by shaping our common life to accord with our religious teachings: only then will we continue to live in the land.

After Yehosua Ben Nun died it became clear that the northern tribes had not been careful in this regard. Sefer Shoftim [Judges] witnesses the constant difficulties that those tribes had from the native population.

For the Ramban, the mitzvah of living in the land is completed only when the possibility of educating the next generations in the Torah way is possible. Therefore he posits the word vehorashtem as the critical one. There is no reason to think that Rashi disagreed with this principle.

When Jews returned in large numbers to Eretz Yisrael starting at the end of the nineteenth century, they were not as concerned as they might have been with the larger problems: integrating different kinds of Jews into the fabric of one nation or dealing, long term, with the large non-Jewish native population which found the Zionist dream oppressive to them and to their conception of history. These problems were exacerbated after the Six Day War.

Today, almost forty years later, we see that we have not been able to deal with those problems well. We are on the eve of the mourning for the destruction of the Temple which symbolized everything that was different about our people and was lost as we lost our political freedom. Second, we are involved in a painful disengagement whose actual results remain unclear, but which indicates that we cannot change or relationship to the other people in a way that would enable vehorashtem.

At times it seems easier in the diaspora. In Eretz Yisrael, we have to maintain our special qualities, teach Torah and mitzvot, and assume some responsibility for all the populations living here. Since we cannot, apparently, do the mitzvah of settling the land as the Ramban understood it, we have to find other ways to maintain our identity in this difficult time.

Gut shabbos,
Chaim Brovender

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