brekin » Thu Jun 27, 2013 7:47 pm wrote:compared2what wrote:
Remember. Israel is not and never has been a religiously justified country. Judaism doesn't call for it to be there.
Well, one quibble with that:
The Promised Land (Hebrew: הארץ המובטחת, translit.: Ha'Aretz HaMuvtahat) is the land promised or given by God, according to the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible), to the Israelites, the descendants of Jacob. The promise is first made to Abraham (Genesis 15:18-21) and then renewed to his son Isaac, and to Isaac's son Jacob (Genesis 28:13), Abraham's grandson. The promised land was described in terms of the territory from the River of Egypt to the Euphrates river (Exodus 23:31) and was given to their descendants after Moses led the Exodus out of Egypt. (Deuteronomy 1:8)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promised_land
Remember the 6200 pages of arguing rabbis that typically characterize every point of Jewish law above and beyond the bare minimum to which I referred earlier?
They make that kind of thing difficult to address definitively, which is a very unfortunate quirk, under the circumstances.
But very broadly speaking: In religious terms, that's not regarded as "real," in the sense of:
A feeling of entitlement to Eretz Israel in one's lifetime, prior to the coming of the Messiah, in the present day, is not the take-away from Exodus or that story, which is -- obviously -- foundational to Judaism.
That's not what's being taught or exemplified. It's not what's intended. It's just not. People (not the bickering rabbis, I mean, "people in the present day") sometimes argue that now, after the fact, for political reasons. It can be argued. Because everything and its opposite always can be.
But the general, routine, run-of-the-mill understanding of it is as symbolic, religious myth. Always has been.
I mean:
Why would it have been so impossible for zionists to interest enough people in going to Palestine for more than 200 or so people to attend the annual World Zionist Conference in any year of Herzl's life if it was something that had strong, natural appeal to Jews on religious grounds?
Most Jews living under Stalin (including my numerous forebears in the Ukraine, two of whom starved to death during the famine) didn't want to go.
That's how not naturally appealing it is as a reality.
Look. This...
Knowing the Exodus is not a literal historical accounting does not ultimately change our connection to each other or to God. Faith should not rest on splitting seas. At the Passover Seder we declare: "In each generation, each individual should see himself as if he (or she) went forth from Egypt." The message does not depend upon whether 3 or 3 million individuals left.
In a book explaining how orthodox scholarship views the Torah, Rabbi Shlomo Carmy writes that he was always troubled by the omission of the exodus from Egypt in the book of Chronicles. Why does the concluding book of the Hebrew Bible elide this central story? His answer is in a prophecy by Jeremiah (16:14-15) that one day the liberation from Babylonian captivity will be more important than the liberation from Egypt. History will give way to messianism. In the future the very story of the exodus is omitted, for it is not the specifics of history, but the theme of liberation and of God's providential care that is the theological center.
...from
Did the Exodus Really Happen? by Rabbi David Wolpe (in a word: No.) is reasonably representative of the kind of interpretation that's typical, although the substance is highly variable and all over the place. Meaning: The emphasis is either on spiritual truths, or religious obligations, or both. It's just not about tangible entitlements, in that way. And I really don't know what else to tell you. It's not.
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You can kind of infer the non-reality aspects of it pretty quickly from the "Next year in Jerusalem!" part of a seder, if the parting of the Red Sea and plagues haven't already tipped you off. Because if you were really just talking about Jerusalem, a city in the present-day, real-world country of Israel, what's the hang up? Why wait? You could just go.
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That said, completely contradictory assertions by people purporting to be authorities on the subject will be easy to find all over the internet. Some of them may even be by religious apolitical authorities. Although I doubt it. But whatever. Yes. Sure. They do say that.
It's still not that kind of promise, and there's a millennium or so of absolute non-return and no attempts at one after the diaspora to prove it. Just not true. Except ex post facto. But that's political. (IOW: Not Judaism.)
Some tangents of Christianity (aka -- Christian zionism) understood the literal repatriation of the Jews to the Promised Land to be a religious necessity before Herzl's brand of zionism came into being. (Very nearly the same time, really. But technically it was before.) But again. That's not Judaism, where that idea was then neither current nor present. Not that he was a religious Jew. But had he been, that wouldn't have been where it came from.
It took non-understanding for that idea to be born. Basically.
