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Israel (the Holy Land) is in the news everyday. Fights, explosions, murders, and so forth are part of the Middle East problem.

What about Israel? I share with you an article I found among my filed written by Rabbi Klenicki (an old friend) and Dr. Fisher on November 15, 1989 for the professional Approaches for Christian Educators. It is their article. Both sincere and holy men give us an insight into the Holy Land problem. Read it with an open mind.

Promised Land in Judaism and Christianity
The Jewish understanding of the eternity of the Land is indispensable as we search to foster relationships between Jews and Christians. An understanding of the centrality of the Land is as important to Judaism as the understanding of Jesus and his mission is to Christianity. The Land for Jews and Jesus for Christians—thee two incarnate the hope and fervor of each religion’s commitment to God.

This article offers two approaches to the concept of the Promised Land. The first, by Rabbi Klenicki, is from the Jewish point of view; the second, by Dr. Fisher, is from the Christian.

The Promised Land: Jewish Perspectives

The Land as Central
Land is the central theme of biblical faith. Faith, Emunah, in Hebrew, is the acceptance of God, Amen and the obligation of God’s call. The very beginning of the Jewish people relates to a call and a promise. God promises Abraham that out of him and Sarah will come a community with a sense of history. Goi Gadol, a people that is to become identified with a specific place on earth, the Promised Land. Israel becomes God’s landed people.

The landed people suffered exile and return as historical experiences that marked Israel’s vocation through the centuries. Egyptian slavery was a prelude to the return to the Land; the return is preceded by the revelation at Sinai and the commitment of the Commandments. The slaves were transformed into partners of God, subjects of faith. Every experience of exile is followed by an inner change of the heart—Israel is renewed by pain.

After the Babylonian Exile, the return to the Land prophesied the renewal of the covenant, as it is suggested by Jeremiah 31:31-34.

Rabbinic Theology and the Concept of the Land
The rabbinic theological commentary to the Bible was compiled in the second century of the common era. It was known and studied by Jesus and his disciples. The commentary expounded the meaning of God’s word making the Hebrew experience in Scripture relevant to the daily life of the community.

The rabbinic teachers considered history and other fundamental events of Jewish religious history as part of a divine design.

The centrality of the Land and the return to the Land is expressed in daily liturgy, in the eighteen Benedictions, as well as in the annual Passover celebration.

Medieval thought continues the rabbinic explanation adding mystical dimensions to the Jewish longing for the Land. The messianic movement emphasized the redemptive meaning of the return and filled the hearts of the oppressed Jewish masses with hope. The “suffering Servant”—Israel under feudal and ecclesiastic hardship—was to be redeemed by a messianic restoration to Jerusalem. Yehuda Ha Levi (circa 1085-1141 C.E.), the Spanish poet and theologian, stressed the biblical concept of the interrelationship between God-Israel and God’s Land. He held that the Covenant requires a place for realization, and Jews living in this place could fulfill their religious vocation and overcome exile and persecution. Thus Ha-Levi expressed a Zionist biblical yearning that was formulated politically by Theodore Herzl in the twentieth century.

The Present Reality of exile and Return: The Twentieth Century
Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (1772-1810 C.E.) declared in one of his homilies that “Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel) is a symbol of the future renovation of the universe-that is – it is a messianic symbol.” The Hasidic teacher expressed a feeling many Jews feel in the twentieth century. After experiencing the horror of the Holocaust—the organized destruction of European Jewry by Nazi Germany—those who survived turned their eyes to the Land. Zionism was more than a political ideology, it was a dream of millennia to be fulfilled in the creation of the state of Israel. Zionism is a hope in God made a reality. A prayer sees Israel as “…the beginning of our redemption.: It is a redemption to be worked out daily through triumph over political shortcomings and crises.These expectations of messianic hope and redemption are clearly expressed by an adolescent in Belgium who was captured by the Gestapo and shipped to Auschwitz where he died.

Catholic Teaching and the Land of Israel
In its much discussed section VI, the 1985 Vatican Notes on the Correct Way to Present Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Catechesis (hereafter, referred to as Notes) urges Catholic teachers to develop in students a positive appreciation for the “religious attachment” between the people of Israel and the Land of Israel. Rabbi Klenicki has given a Jewish perspective on the Covenant-rooted relationship between God’s people and their Holy Land. (See also Genesis 17:1-11; 28:10-22). How may Catholic teachers understand and present to their students this teaching, which is also affirmed by the church?

Confronting Ancient Polemics
By the fourth century, many Christians had convinced themselved, despite Saint Paul’s clear warnings to the contrary (see Romans 9-11), that God had rejected the Jews for their alleged crime of rejecting Jesus. Out of spite, Christians such as Saint John Chrysostum proclaimed that God cursed the Jews, allowing the Romans to destroy the
Jersusalem Temple in 70 C.E. and to drive the Jews out of their ancient capital, Jerusalem, to wander the world in permanent Diaspora (dispersion) until they recognized their folly and accepted Baptism into the church. But the self-contradictions of the thesis escaped its Christian proponents for many long and (for Jews) tragic centuries.

The Second Vatican Council, however, tackled this “teaching of contempt” head on. First, it flatly denied that the Jews, either in the first century or today, could be considered collectively guilty for Jesus’ death. Having established the absence of collective guilt, there could be no collective curse:

“The Jews should not be presented as repudiated or cursed by God, as if such views followed from Sacred Scriptures” (Nostra Aetate, #4). Individual New Testament passages such as Luke 19:44, which reflect the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., therefore, must not be generalized beyond their historically conditioned intent.

Developing a Catechesis of the Land of Israel
Notes gives to the Diaspora and Jewish attachment to the land a positive, universally significant value for church teaching as a “sign to be interpreted within God’s design.” The covenantal relationship between the people and the Land of Israel is not just a promise, as many Christians mistakenly say, but a permanent gift to Jews to possess the Land forever, to use the unambiguous and consistent language of the Bible.

God’s Covenant-gift (we Catholics might use the term, grace, here.) is not conditional but, as is the nature of divine grace, unconditional and unmerited. Anything less reduces the divine mystery to a merely historical problem and, in effect, denies God’s faithfulness to God’s word.

Such a reduction and such a denial puts at risk our understanding of God’s faithfulness to the church. We have sinned no less and been no more faithful in witnessing to God over the centuries that have the Jewish people. Israel remains, in the words of Notes, God’s “chosen people, the pure olive on which were grafted the branches of the wild olive tree” (Romans !!:17).

That olive tree, Notes seem to indicate, needs to be planted firmly and concretely in the Land of Israel. Like the sacraments of the church, the spiritual reality of God’s grace must be embodied in physical, tangible reality as part of our world and our history. Anything less reduces the reality to empty rhetoric and meaningless ritual.

Distinction Between the Land and State of Israel
If the physical presence of Jews in the Land of Israel is a necessary element of the “sacrament” (as Catholic thought would put it) of the people of Israel as a faithful witness to God in the world, what may we say of the present era that has seen the gathering of the Jewish people in the Land and the establishment of the third Jewish commonwealth in Israel’s long history? Certainly, as the Notes remind us, there is a difference between the Land (Eretz) and the state (Medinat) of Israel. The latter is founded on the common principles of interational law. Its specific political options and state policies can by freely criticized by Christians on the basis of those same principles (equally applicable, of course, to all other states and peoples in the Middle East). So we must be cautious about seeing in the modern state any exaggerated sense of its being, theologically, a direct fulfillment of the biblical promises, as the Reverend Jerry Falwell and some others might preach. Here, “not yet” aspect of the church’s eschatological proclamation of the reign of God must be especially remembered. We must not be tempted as those living in the early church were, of “counting the days”.

However, without the existence and security of the state of Israel, it is doubtful whether Jews in our time could maintain their traditional presence in the land. If that Jewish presence is lost, might something essential to the church’s own witness to “God’s faithfulness be lost with it?

For the time being such thoughts remain in the realm of theological speculation. Catechetically, however, I believe that the notion of the “sacramentality” of the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel remains a fruitful source for careful Catholic reflection today.