The Place of “Place” in Jewish Tradition

Abstract

The Place of “Place” in Jewish Tradition Nina Beth Cardin Since the beginning of time, humans have had a problem with land. The first dilemma, of course, was the very mystery of land. That is, how did land itself, the ground we walk on, come into being? All relationship with and attitude toward the land would flow from this answer. The Torah addresses that problem with its opening line: God created the heavens and the earth. That being the case, we can then conclude that God owns the land. All human claims to the land, therefore, are grounded in this basic knowledge. God first owned the land. It did not originally belong to us. Therefore, we must justify somehow any subsequent claim to use or ownership we may profess. But, how do we do that? What are our rights to the land? How are they earned? How conferred? How secured? In addition we need to ask, even after justifying a claim to the land, what is the status of the land? Does this land/all land have a spiritual dimension? Or is it just a prop of life, a platform on which human history is played out? Can we do anything we want with it? Is it possible to lose our claim to land? If so, how? In which case what happens to the land? Does all land have the same meaning, or are some places different, holier, than others? These questions about the status of land underlie the world’s most pressing issues: political, economical and spiritual. They affect questions of property ownership and economic distribution of resources, environmental injustice, geopolitical warfare, resource and waste management, environmental ethics, and so on. And while Judaism is richly steeped in conversations on these subjects, with laws stipulating the proper use and distribution of land rights, the welfare of animals, appreciation of nature as witness to the majesty of God, etc., I am going to largely avoid these for the purposes of this paper and focus on the place of “place” in Jewish tradition. As noted above, humans cannot ignore the experience and discourse of land. After all, we cannot exist without a place to be. All our experience is bound up with place. One of the first memories we recall about a remarkable or tragic event is where we were when it happened. Einstein’s teacher, Hermann Minkowski, captured it succinctly when he said: “Nobody ever noticed a place except at a time, or a time except at a place.” Jewish tradition, especially in its biblical stories, intimately combines event and place. Indivisible from the telling of our sacred history is the story of land itself. For the Jewish people, land is not just a backdrop, not a prop, but a partner, a covenantal character in our long unfolding sacred saga. Cultures with autochthonous myths had it much easier. If the land spit you out, gave birth to you, you could claim that you belonged to that land, and that land belonged to you. (Remnants of this tradition remain in force even today. Citizenship is often determined not by parental status but by location at birth.) But a creation story that speaks of human beings created by God and then placed on the earth, or even created from the earth but not in a geographically identifiable or reclaimable spot, makes it problematic to claim possession and rights to a particular place. The Bible clearly wants to state that land is God’s and any use or claim we humans make on it must be somehow divinely justifiable. Even more, the story of the Jewish people begins with Abraham outside the land that his descendants would eventually call their own. Yet an enduring claim to a particular place is essential for a tradition like Judaism that is built on peoplehood. Even more telling, then, is the fact that the people were not born of, or in, the land. The Torah clearly wants to teach that no matter how central Israel:the land is to Israel:the people, occupancy in that land is a gift, not a given. The land belongs to God, and was gifted as part of the covenant, a dynamic...