WHO MADE IT KNOWN THAT HE WAS A HEBREW?

Today’s sermon must begin with seven words: Thank you, G-d, for the awesome miracles! Thank you, soldiers, for your selfless sacrifice! Thank you, Israel, for your endless courage!

Israel’s war to end Hamas’s rule in Gaza such open miracles we have not seen in years. They are mind-staggering. During the first Gulf War in 1991, 39 Iraqi missiles fell – many in heavily populated areas – and yet nobody died from a missile. By contrast, one Scud missile fell on a U.S. Army barracks in Saudi Arabia, killing tens of U.S. soldiers.

This past month, many rockets fell on Tel Aviv, Bat Yam, Haifa, Rehovot, and Beer Sheva, with the aim of Iran to see, heaven forbid, rivers of blood flowing in Israel. Many of the rockets damaged many homes. Yet at this time, 30 lives were lost. Thank G-d, not more… and we pray and wish a speedy recovery to those who were injured. Homes were hit seconds after their residents left them. Children’s camps were hit moments after they were emptied.

Thank you, Hashem. And thank you to your messengers on earth—the holy soldiers of the IDF, and the entire people of Israel, whose celebration of life and hope is unparalleled.

As our minds and hearts are with our brothers and sisters in Israel, we study the Torah portion, Pinchas, which captures in a rather moving way our unwavering love and dedication to the Land of Israel.

Not much is known about the lives of Machlah, Noah, Chaglah, Milkah, and Tirtzah. But at a defining moment in the history of Israel, these five sisters, daughters of Tzelafchad the son of Chefer, profoundly influenced the heart of their Jewish brethren in its relationship to Israel.

Tzelafchad was of the generation born in Egyptian slavery, liberated by the Exodus, and granted the Land of Canaan as Israel's eternal heritage. Although that generation did not merit to take possession of the land themselves, when their children crossed the Jordan River to conquer it, they did so as their fathers' heirs. Each family received its share in the land by its apportionment among the 600,000 members of the generation of the Exodus.

Tzelafchad had five daughters but no sons. The laws of inheritance as they were initially given in the Torah, which recognized only male heirs, made no provision for his share to be claimed by his descendants. Machlah, Noah, Chaglah, Milkah and Tirtzah refused to reconcile themselves to this, and approached Moses with the petition: "Why should our father's name be eliminated from his family, because he has no son? Grant us an estate amongst [the heirs of] our father's brothers."

Moses presented their argument to G-d, who responded: "The daughters of Tzelafchad speak rightly. Give their father's estate to them." (G-d then instructed Moses to include the following clause in the Torah's laws of inheritance: If a man dies and he has no son, you shall pass his estate on to his daughter.)

Rashi wonders about the placement of this episode in the Torah, immediately following the new census of Israel, conducted by Joshua and Elazar, the new leaders of Israel. Why are these two narratives juxtaposed?

The answer Rashi gives is fascinating. The story of the censuses concludes with this verse:
 

“Among these, there was no man counted by Moses.” The emphasis is on the word “man,” rather than “person,” or just “there was none counted by Moses.” Why? “But the women were not included in the decree of the spies, for they cherished the Land! The men said [after the return of the spies], ‘Let us appoint a leader and return to Egypt!’, whereas the women said, ‘Give us a portion [in the land].  This is why the passage of Zelophehad’s daughters follows here.

This is remarkable. The two greatest catastrophes that occurred in the desert were the creation of the Golden Calf and the debacle with the spies who returned from Canaan and dissuaded the people from entering the land. The Torah clearly intimates that in both of these events, the women took no part. In the two historic failures of our people, months after becoming a people, our women remained focused, wise, loyal, and levelheaded.

Parenthetically, now you understand why Judaism always had the deepest respect for women. For when it comes to the important decisions, you've got to hear what the women have to say. Men may sometimes know how to analyze things for the moment, but women have the bird's-eye view for eternity!

You know the joke about how this Rabbi gave a man the best wedding advice: That his wife should be in charge of small decisions and he, the big ones.

After 30 years, he came to the rabbi complaining: In 30 years, there have been no big decisions! To which his wife responded: Of course, there have been—and I allowed you to decide them all! Like what? Asked the husband.

Like what? I will tell you: a big decision is what to do about Global Warming, conflict in Iran, the situation in Russia and Ukraine... that you decide, my dear, and I do not mix in. Small decisions are—where we live, where we send our kids to school, which synagogue we attend, what type of house we buy!

Maybe It Was Just About Real Estate?

But wait! How can we be sure that the daughters of Tzelafchad cherished the land? Maybe they would have asked for their father’s estate in any land, even Finland or Uganda? Perhaps, they were “good Jews” and simply desired some real estate?!

As we will study in the following Torah portion, Matot, the tribe of Manasseh, from which these women descended, was split. Half of the members of the tribe took their inheritance on the Eastern side of the Jordan River together with the two tribes of Reuben and Gad, while half of the tribe received their portion in Israel proper—on the western side of the Jordan River, together with the other nine tribes of Israel. Now these daughters of Tzelafchad said to Moses, “Grant us an estate amongst [the heirs of] our father's brothers." Why did they not simply say, “Grant us our father’s portion/estate?” Or, “Grant us our father’s portion among our father’s family?” Why did they single out his brothers?

And the answer is quite interesting. In Joshua ch. 17, we discover that the rest of the family settled on the western side of the Jordan. It was their uncles who received their portion of the land on the Western side of the Jordan.

These women not only request the estate of their father. They did not simply want land; they wanted land in Eretz Israel. They loved the Holy Land. And this is indeed what they received!

There is an obvious redundancy here. Why does the Torah state that the daughters of Tzelafchad were from the family of Menaseh, the son of Joseph, when the verse just stated that they were descendants of Menaseh? We all know that Menaseh was the son of Joseph!

Rashi presents the following answer. The Torah is trying to explain why and how these women possessed such a burning passion for Israel.

Joseph, their great-great-grandfather, possessed a special love for the Land of Israel. After Genesis, Joseph, the viceroy of Egypt, just before his death, adjured the children of Israel, they take his bones with them when they leave Egypt. More than a century later, when the Jewish slaves embarked on their path to freedom, “Moses took the bones of Joseph with him, for he had firmly adjured the children of Israel, saying, ‘G-d will surely remember you, and you shall bring up my bones from here with you.

The Midrash recounts a moving conversation between Moses and G-d, following G-d telling Moses that he will not enter the land of Israel, not even after death. Moses said to G-d, “Master of the universe, the bones of Joseph will enter the land, and I will not enter the land?!”

G-d’s response is perplexing: “He who acknowledged his land, will be buried in the land; he who did not acknowledge his land, will not be buried in the land. Joseph acknowledged the land; Moses did not.”

What does this mean? Moses was dreaming for 40 years about the land!

The Midrash quotes two episodes demonstrating Joseph’s loyalty to the land, in contrast to one statement made by Moses about Israel.

At the age of seventeen, Joseph was living with his father Jacob in Hebron. The young handsome lad was kidnapped by his brothers and sold into Egyptian slavery. There he acquired the trust of his master, Potiphar, who put him in charge of the home, while his wife was unsuccessfully attempting to seduce Joseph into immoral behavior.

One day, when nobody was home, the woman held on to Joseph, demanding that he betray his morality. Joseph fled the home, leaving his cloak in her hand. She seized the opportunity and cried out: “Look! My husband brought us a Hebrew man to sport with us; he came to lie with me, but I screamed out loudly! When he heard that I raised my voice and screamed, he left his garment beside me, fled outside!”

For this, Joseph was sentenced to prison. For twelve years, he remained incarcerated in an Egyptian dungeon until he was finally liberated to interpret a mysterious dream of the Egyptian emperor, Pharaoh, following which he rose to become the viceroy of the country.

How did Potiphar’s wife describe Joseph? As a “Hebrew man,” This was a most obvious and conspicuous characteristic of Joseph. He never disguised his origin; everybody was aware that he was a member of the Hebrew tribe, coming from the Land of Israel.

The second episode occurs ten years later, while in the Egyptian dungeon. There, Joseph interprets the enigmatic dreams of two of Pharaoh’s assistants, his baker and his butler. The baker, Joseph, predicts that, will be executed; the butler will be set free and restored to his previous post in the palace.

Joseph asks of the butler: “If only you can do me a favor, and mention me to Pharaoh, and get me out of this place, for indeed I was kidnapped from the land of the Hebrews, and even here I have done nothing to them to put me in the dungeon.”

Here again, Joseph proclaims his connection to the Holy Land. “I was kidnapped from the land of the Hebrews.”

Indeed, when the butler does present Joseph’s case to Pharaoh, two years later, that is exactly how he describes Joseph: “There in the dungeon with us was a Hebrew youth, a slave....” The first characteristic by which he defines Joseph is his being “a Hebrew youth.”

In Egyptian society, to be a Hebrew was a badge of shame. That may be the reason why Potiphar’s wife, when seeking to gain credibility for her version of the story that Joseph attempted to violate her, defined him first and foremost as a “Hebrew man.” She knew that this would help her case. When people hear that he is a Jew, they will believe all the ill behavior attributed to him. The Jew is capable of all...

And Joseph made it known that he was a Hebrew, a resident of Israel. Disguising it would perhaps allow him to integrate into Egyptian society, but that would mean lying to himself and the world. What type of life is that?

Years later, while suffering in prison, attempting to seek the Egyptian ruler’s grace to set him free of his misery, it would have been even more logical for him to underplay his true identity. Why did he tell the butler, “I was kidnapped from the land of the Hebrews,” and put his entire freedom at risk?

Furthermore, how can Joseph define the land as “The land of the Hebrews”? At the time, the land was home to 31 kingdoms, consisting of large and powerful tribes, while the Hebrews were comprised of fewer than 70 members, and lived in part of one city, Hebron.

Now, let us shift our attention to Moses. Following his escape from Pharaoh’s sword, Moses spent time at the well of Midian. There, the Jewish boy who grew up in the Egyptian palace rescued Jethro's seven daughters from shepherds harassing them, and he watered their sheep. When the daughters came home and their father asked them how they managed to make it home so quickly, they replied, “An Egyptian man saved us from the shepherds, and he even drew water for us and watered the sheep.”

“An Egyptian man” was the way they described Moses. In other words, Moses allowed them to get the impression that he was Egyptian. Moses did not necessarily tell them he was an Egyptian; he merely didn’t protest their impression of him as such.

Joseph, concludes the Midrash, embraced his land; hence, he was interred there; Moses did not; hence, he remained outside of it.

But this is perplexing. Moses wasn’t born in Israel, nor did he ever visit there. He was an Egyptian! He was born in Egypt, spent time on the Nile—quite literally, and then was raised in the palace of the Egyptian monarch! Why would Moses identify himself as a Hebrew from the land of the Hebrews?

The answer was presented by the great Chassidic master Rabbi Yechiel Meir of Ostrovtze. What is the connection between the Jewish people and the Holy Land, both in the past and in the present? Is it merely a national one? Jews reside in Israel, and they are citizens of the country, so they are naturally connected to it. No! For the last 2000 years, Jews have been exiled and dispersed all over the globe, yet they still spoke of Israel as their home; they cried for it as their spiritual epicenter. It was the core of their longings, dreams, and aspirations.

For 2000 years, Jews have prayed three times a day in the direction of Israel; they have beseeched G-d to return them to their homeland; they have concluded every Seder and Yom Kippur service with the declaration, “Next year in Jerusalem!” They have fasted each year, without fail, on the day their exile from Israel began.

Why? If it were merely a nationalistic obsession, it should have diminished with the two millennia of living elsewhere.

The answer to this enigma has been articulated in countless works of Jewish philosophy and mysticism: Each Jew—secular and observant alike—is organically linked to the land of Israel. Israel for the Jew is not merely a nationality; it is the home of the Jewish inner consciousness. The Jewish soul is rooted in the energy vibrating in the atmosphere of Eretz Israel.

The 10th century Jew thriving on the Rhine, the 16th century Jew walking the streets of Krakow, the 20th century Jew struggling in communist Moscow, and the Jew of 21st century sipping coffee in a Soho Starbucks—each of them was and is aware, on a conscious or subconscious level, that his or her soul is inherently interconnected with Israel. He may have never visited the physical territory, but it is still home. How? Because his or her soul originated there, and was merely grafted to the Diaspora, to imbue it with the sanctity of Eretz Israel.

Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Nobel Laureate in literature, put it best in his 1966 acceptance speech for the prize: “As a result of the historic catastrophe in which Titus of Rome destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the cities of the exile.

But I always regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem.”

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu expressed a similar historical outlook in a speech he gave to the US Congress: “In Judea and Samaria, the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers. We are not the British in India; we are not the Belgians in the Congo. This is the land of our forefathers, the Land of Israel, to which Abraham brought the idea of one God, where David set out to confront Goliath, and where Isaiah saw a vision of eternal peace. No distortion of history can deny the 4,000-year-old bond between the Jewish people and the Jewish land.”

Two thousand years ago, the Jews were exiled from their land. The violent ethnic cleansing of the area that took place so long ago could have been forgotten by history. However, history remembered the Jews since the Jews never forgot their homeland. And almost 2,000 years later, by the grace of G-d, Jews returned to the Land of Israel, and today most of the Jews of the world live there!

What we love, our children will likely come to love. Generations after Joseph’s death, his great-great-granddaughters, the daughters of Tzelafchad, were in love with the land. They demanded from Moses a portion in their land, and G-d gave it to them.

My dear beloved friends! Our brothers and sisters in the Holy Land are at war—yet once again. Fighting for their very existence. Today we all need to be Josephs—and daughters of Tzelafchad. At times like this, each one of us becomes an ambassador for Israel.

As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks put it so well: 

In July 1938, leaders of 32 nations gathered in the French spa town of Evian, knowing that something terrible was going to happen to the Jews, knowing that unless they did something, a tragedy would unfold that would exceed all the twenty centuries of anti-Semitism put together.

And one by one, without exception, the nations of the world closed their doors. At that moment, the Jewish people knew that on all the vast surface of this planet, there was not one square inch they could call home in the sense given by Robert Frost as the place where, when you have to go there, they have to let you in.

Today, because of Israel, the Jewish people have a home.

And when the war was over and one third of our people had been murdered, the Jewish people could have sat and wept and raged at the darkest night humanity has ever known. But it didn’t.

It looked forward, not back. It chose life, not death.
80 years ago, the entire Jewish people said, “Lo amut ki echyah,” I will not die, I will live.

From the day the state was proclaimed until now, Israel has not had one day without the fear of war, or terror, or missiles, or worse. And throughout it all, Israel has stood firm and brave and strong.

After the Holocaust, the nations of the world said Never again. But anti-Semitism has returned to virtually every country in the Middle East, and even, unbelievably, to Europe, from Greece in the south to Norway and Sweden in the north, from France and Spain in the west to Hungary in the east.

Whatever happened to Never again? Today, it looks more like it ever did again.
But one thing has changed. Because of Israel, the Jewish people have a place where they can defend themselves.

And if Israel is criticized by people who should know better, then we would still rather have Israel and the criticism of the world than be homeless and defenseless and have the sympathy of the world.

But the truth is that Israel is a blessing not just to us as Jews. Israel is a blessing not just to its citizens but to the world.

Because while its enemies have been holding whole populations captive to the pursuit of arms and missiles and terror, Israel has been developing agriculture to grow food where no food was ever grown before. Developing medicine to heal sicknesses that were not healed before. Developing technology to create human possibilities that did not exist before.

As I go around Israel, I see a country that has taken every curse thrown against it and turned it into a blessing, by leading the fight against terror, by becoming world experts in treating post-traumatic stress disorder, and by bringing disaster relief wherever it’s needed.

I see a country and a people that have shown the world what it is to choose life.

So let us say loud and clear: We love Israel. We are proud of Israel. Thank you, G-d, for protecting Israel and showing us so many miracles over the last few weeks.

May God bless Israel! May G-d bless our soldiers and bring the hostages home safe. May G-d bless every Jew, man, woman, and child living in Israel, and may He protect all innocent civilians. May G-d give our leaders the wisdom and the courage to protect our people and our homeland.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky