My land

The following is a piece I was commissioned to write for a book the Municipality of La Plata is preparing, featuring stories from each community that makes up our city. The idea was to write stories about the land from which one or one's ancestors immigrated to Argentina. But this created a conflict for me. And this is what I wrote.

My land

My land. The question immediately arises: What is my land? Because if we define “my land” as the place of origin of my ancestors, we could say that “my land” corresponds to places like Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and Syria. But if we define “my land” as the true place of belonging of a people, then the land of the Jewish people is the Land of Israel.

To explain this idea, we must understand, at least in part, the history of the Jewish people and their mission in life.

The Jewish people were born with the patriarch Avraham, to whom God Himself promised "To your descendants I gave this land" (Genesis 15:18), referring to the Land of Israel through which Avraham was traveling (at that time the land of Canaan).

Then the same Divine promise is made to Isaac, the son of Abraham (Genesis 26:3), and to Jacob, his grandson (Genesis 28:13). But it is not until the departure of the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob from the land of Egypt, where they were “slaves in a foreign land” (Genesis 15:13), and the subsequent Giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, that this family becomes the Jewish people.

A people born in the middle of a desert, that is, not settled on their own land, in the midst of a journey from slavery toward a promised land that no individual of this "new people" had ever seen or lived in. In other words, the birth of the people is intrinsically linked to inheriting, in practice, to populating, a land promised by God to the patriarchs of the people.

Continuing the story, the Jewish people entered the land, transformed it into the Land of Israel, and lived there for over seven hundred years, until they were exiled by the Babylonian Empire. They returned to their land after seventy years, remained there for over five hundred years, and were exiled again, this time by the Roman Empire. An exile that continues to this day.

Although there has always been a Jewish settlement in the Holy Land (uninterrupted for more than 3300 years!) and a Jewish state was founded there almost seventy years ago, the fact that not all of the Jewish people are living there means that the diaspora exile continues.

It then emerges that, from its very birth, the Jewish people traveled through foreign lands, yearning and desiring to go or return to their land.

This, in my opinion, is the root of the paradigm of the Jewish people that has been expressed throughout their existence on earth: a people with a specific land, but who, for one reason or another, do not live on it.

This land is not only a territory defined in the Bible itself (Numbers 34:1-12) but also possesses a unique characteristic: it is a land under God's special supervision, as it is written (Deuteronomy 11:12): “The eyes of the Lord are always on it, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year.” Furthermore, it is the land chosen by God to build His house, the Great Temple in Jerusalem (Psalm 132:13-14). And it is only there that the Jewish people can fulfill their mission, their reason for being on earth.

The mission of the Jewish people consists of the observance of a series of precepts (Mitzvot) given by God on Mount Sinai. Many of these precepts can only be fulfilled in the Land of Israel, so if the Jewish people are not there (along with other conditions beyond the scope of this text) they simply cannot reach the fullness of their own reason for being.

This, in other words, is a way of seeing the awe-inspiring connection between the Jewish people and their land: God's chosen people inhabit the land chosen by God. And only there can they truly reach their full potential as a people and as individuals.

A simple example to understand this is that of a vineyard. A vineyard doesn't thrive equally well in just any soil; it needs a specific climate, a particular type of soil, and so on. Similarly, the Jewish people would be the vineyard in the example, and the Land of Israel the fertile soil where that vineyard can reach its full potential.

This perspective on the history and mission of the Jewish people helps us understand that Jews have a very particular relationship with the Land of Israel, a relationship that accompanies them everywhere they go, even in their daily prayers, since prayer must be directed toward the Land of Israel. This indicates their longing and desire to live there.

This marks a fundamental difference between the longing and remembrance of other peoples for their homelands and the longing and remembrance of the Jewish people for their land. In the case of other peoples, the longing and remembrance is for familiar landscapes, language, customs, and local traditions. But at no point do landscape, language, customs, and traditions constitute the wholeness of a people or an individual. Moreover, if they manage to find characteristics similar to their place of origin in other parts of the world, they can revive their language, customs, and traditions without much difficulty, as we see, for example, in the German colonies in the Bariloche area.

The case of the Jewish people is different. There is no other land that can replace or even pretend to be the Land of Israel, because of its character as the promised land chosen by God.

However, when a Jew assimilates and seeks to resemble the environment in which he lives, he forgets this profound connection to his homeland and confuses his own customs and longing to return to that land, partially (and sometimes completely) replacing them with local customs. He then adopts customs foreign to his essence, changes his language, his way of dressing, and even the names he gives his children! In general, he becomes just another inhabitant of his current land.

But deep down he knows that he does not belong where he is, and that concept, sometimes conscious and sometimes subconscious, gives the Jew strength to continue identifying as such, even under the most unfavorable conditions.

For many years in the past and in many parts of the world, the Jewish people were forbidden from observing their laws. This prohibition was accompanied by persecution and massacres. However, today, in this fertile land that is Argentina, the Jewish people, like so many others, enjoy absolute freedom to observe their laws.

This is at a macro level. The same thing happens at a micro level, in our city of La Plata. On many occasions and over many years, we have witnessed the goodwill and concrete help of our city's leaders in facilitating freedom of religion.

May God grant that this valuable effort to remember the lands of origin of each community that inhabits our city will serve to help each one to revive their roots and to realize that, in the end, all human beings are children of the First Man and the First Woman, we all emerged from the same place and, each with our laws, customs and traditions, we are going towards the same place.