I Will Make You A Great Nation There כִּי-לְגוֹי גָּדוֹל אֲשִׂימְךָ שָׁם

This past week I read something that I can't recall ever hearing out of the mouth of any Jew; that Israel does not have a religious claim on Jerusalem, only a nationalist claim, as it is the capital of Israel. I found it simultaneously disheartening, and maddening.

Dan Meridor was quoted as saying this in Der Speigel. Now I've read an account of the interview during which the statement was made, in which the "journalist" doing the interview was overtly belligerent, steering the interview in an attempt to make Meridor defend Israel as being racist, fascist, whatever the attack du jour was at the time. But what does it mean when a Jew says there is only a nationalist claim, not a religious one?

Isn't that the point of the Jewish people being in Jerusalem...Ir HaKodesh?

I saw this as an attempt to divorce the State of Israel from the spiritual connection that the People of Israel have with the land, with Jerusalem. I have felt for a long time that this attempted division has essentially been Israel's biggest problem; not the Arabs, not the Jew hating world community, but Israel's inability at the highest level to fully embrace the notion that Eretz Yisrael is the land of the Jewish people. It is not ours to give away, to divide ourselves from. It is ours to make bloom. It is ours because it is the one place over the last 3000 some-0dd years that we have had control of our national destiny...because it is our home. It is our home as it is the physical embodiment of our covenant with the G-d of Israel.

Refusing to say that is why we have successive governments ending up in negotiations with avowed killers of Jews while removing Jews from their lands, uprooting their communities, and destroying the work of their hands...instead of uprooting and destroying our enemies. This is why Olmert didn't lead the country in defeating Hezbollah, or Hamas, and why Israel allows Fatah, the PLO, the PFLP, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs, and the rest of the alphabet soup to continue to operate and exist. They were just allowed to hold their international Plot the Destruction of Israel convention in Beit Lechem, voted that destroying Israel is at the top of the "To Do" list, and yet the Prime Minister is still entertaining negotiations with them. To what end? They will commit a mass act of Tshuva and embrace Israel and the Jewish people?

Then I began to rethink Meridor's statement. He is right, we do have a nationalist claim to Yerushalayim...it is our capital. But our nationalist claim is our religious claim. It was then that I fully understood something. I had always seen the Jewish people of having a duel identity; as a nation, and as a religion. It's really a false division. There really is no Jewish "religion." We are in fact a nation. We live by a set of laws, like any other nation. But Am Yisrael's laws not only serve to guide us in issues of how we are to conduct ourselves, but are designed to establish and maintain our nation's relationship with the G-d of Israel.

We wear tefillin, pray three times a day, keep kosher, celebrate certain festivals, not because the nation of Israel created a religion, but because it is prescribed that our nation do these things. These are things the nation of Israel just does, or is supposed to do anyway. So, when a Jew is asked what religion they are perhaps it is more accurate to say that he or she does not have a religion, but that they are of the nation of Israel. The only problem is that most goyim are not going to have any idea what you're talking about so you're going to have to give them an explanation like I just did.

I have a feeling that if the Jewish state operated more like the Nation of Israel it would be less difficult for goyim to understand, and Israeli politicians wouldn't be so willing to discount or misrepresent the relationship between Israel and Jerusalem, and the Land of Israel.

Shavuah Tov