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"And you shall drive them out and you shall dwell in their land" (Deuteronomy 12:29). The Rabbis ((Sifri, Re'eh 80)say concerning the verse: "The mitzvah of living in Eretz Yisrael is equal to all the commandments of the Torah." Therefore, "A man should dwell in Eretz Yisrael , even in a city that is completely inhabited by gentiles, and not outside the land, though it be a city that is completely Jewish" (Tosefta, Avoda Zara 5).
The rabbis add: " Wh0ver lives outside Eretz Yisrael, is like one who has no G-d".
The halacha is clear that a Jew must live in Eretz Yisrael and woe unto a generation that has lost sight of the clear truth. But dwelling in Eretz Yisrael is not just another halacha. It is an essential, fundamental one. Consider:
When the Almighty freed the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt, he did not give them a Torah there. He did not command them to keep His laws and live in Egypt or anywhere they wished to. The question is: Why? If the main purpose was to make the Jewish people a holy people, observing the laws of the Torah, why could this obligation not be placed upon the Jews without reference to where they lived? Just as a Catholic was never commanded to live only in Rome but can be a good son or daughter of the Catholic Church in Austria, Australia, or Brooklyn; and just as a good Moslem need not live in Mecca (he need only go there once in his lifetime on a pilgrimage)- why is it that the Almighty insisted that all the Jews leave Egypt and go to Eretz Yisrael rather than allowing them to settle as good and "frum" Jews in Goshen where they could set up their own yeshivas and shtiebels?
Secondly, we find an amazing statement by the Rabbis in the Sifri (Ekev 43): "Even though I exile you, continue to be marked with mitzvot [i.e., continue to keep them] so that when you return to Eretz Yisrael they will not be new [i.e., unfamiliar] to you."
Astounding! This is the reason for a Jew to put on tefillin and affix a mezuza in the Exile? Merely so that it should not be unfamiliar to him when he returns to Eretz Yisrael?! One would imagine that the reason that a Jew in Brooklyn or Los Angeles or Toronto should put on tefillin is that it is a mitzvah sh'begufo, a mitzvah that is personal to his body wherever he is, his place of residence being irrelevant.
But the truth, the fundamental truth, the, alas, bitter truth to too many observant Jews, is that the Almighty wanted the Jews to live in Eretz Yisrael ONLY, and He gave the mitzvot to be PRACTICED ONLY in Eretz Yisrael. Over and over again, we find the Torah making statements like: "Behold, I have taught you decrees and ordinances...that you should do within the land that you go to possess" (Deuteronomy 4:5)
The reason is succinctly stated by the Ibn Ezra (Deuteronomy 4:10): "For the L-rd knew that [the Jewish people] could not do His commandments properly as long as they were in the lands that ruled over them." And the Sforno (Deuteronomy 6:21) adds: "And since in our bondage we could not acquire the completeness directed from Him, He did wondrously to take us out and bring us to a land where we could acquire that completeness."
There it is! The Almighty insisted and INSISTS that the Jew be removed from all other peoples, isolated ("lo, it is a people that dwells alone"- Numbers 23:9), because He knows the immutable, natural fact that the Jew living as a minority under a majority gentile culture cannot help but be influenced by that culture. Like gamma rays, the non-Jewish culture and ideas and concepts bombard the Jew so that he is subtly and not-so-subtly influenced by his gentilized environment. And, thus, the Torah that he practices is not practiced "properly" (to quote the Ibn Ezra), and is without completeness (to quote the Sforno). It becomes a system of ritual that is bereft of so much of the conceptual content because other concepts, majority concepts, majority non-Jewish concepts, influence us.
That is why the Almighty, from the very beginning of Jewish national history in Egypt, demanded that the Jew live only in one country- HIS country- where he could be as isolated as much as humanly possible from conflicting cultures and concepts. That is why He still demands it today.
And that is, indeed, the clear message of the Sifri quoted above. The mitzvot were never meant to be practiced outside Eretz Yisrael. They were always meant to be kept ONLY in Eretz Yisrael for the basic reason I have mentioned above. But since the Almighty knew that the Jews would be driven out of their land and live in the exile, He decreed that they should continue to observe mitzvot solely for the reason that they not be forgotten when they, the Jews, returned to Eretz Yisrael, the only place where the mitzvot were designed to be kept.
The Jewish Press, 1988
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