The Jewish Connection to Israel, the Promised Land: A Brief Introduction for Christians

By Rabbi Eugene Korn, PhD

A window into the Jewish People’s connection to Israel—
written especially for Christians.

“Israel has taken Jewish sacred history, peoplehood, and ethics out of the realm of speculation and put them into the crucible of real life experience. In returning the Jewish People to its homeland, Israel has returned Jews to material reality—with all its challenges. The Jewish People’s return to the Land returns Judaism to its original vision and the Jewish People to the responsibilities of the biblical covenant.”
—from Chapter 9

Along with illuminating the importance of Israel for Jews, this special book examines the Jewish return to Zion as a significant theological event that strengthens the foundations of the Christian faith and its mission.

In clear and accessible language, this introduction guides Christians through the essential meanings of Israel for the Jewish People and for the world. It defines Israel as an indispensable part of Judaism’s vision for the Jewish People to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy people,” as a partner with God in the Bible’s sacred covenant. It examines Israel, a sovereign Jewish state, as a safe refuge and home for Jews fleeing persecution anywhere in the world, and how this gives meaning to the Jewish People’s convictions that the future can be more secure than the past.

The State of Israel stands at the center of how Jews see themselves today as individuals as well as at the center of the Jewish People’s collective self-perception. As a result, understanding Judaism and the Jewish People is possible only by grasping the Jewish hopes, dreams and experiences that center around Israel, the promised land.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: Oct 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781580236850

Rabbi Eugene Korn, PhD

Rabbi Eugene Korn, PhD, is executive director of the Center for Christian-Jewish Understanding of Sacred Heart University and editor of Meorot—A Forum of Modern Orthodox Discourse. He has written widely on Israel, Jewish thought, and interfaith relations, including his book The Jewish Connection to Israel, the Promised Land: A Brief Introduction for Christians, and is co-editor of End of an Exile: Israel, the Jews and the Gentile World; and Two Faiths, One Covenant?: Jewish and Christian Identity in the Presence of the Other. Rabbi Eugene Korn, PhD, is available to speak on the following topics: Modern Jewish-Christian Relations: A Good Revolution Israel and Christians in the Middle East What are Jewish Ethics Regarding Christians and Other Gentiles? Why Israel Is the Best Hope for Middle East Christians Today Can Judaism and Christianity Make Room for Each Other?

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

ISRAEL IS A WORLD STORY. It is a geographically small country with only seven million citizens, yet it is the focus of endless reporting in the international media. It captures the attention of billions of people all around the world. Israel is a place of great contradictions: a secular country but one with deep religious meaning; a vibrant modern culture where the past beckons every moment; a home to the Jewish people yet a democracy for all persons; a Jewish country seeking acceptance in a region that tolerates only Islamic authority. Perhaps Theodor Herzl best captured the paradox at the end of the nineteenth century in the title of his book, Altneuland (Old-New Land).

The State of Israel was established in 1948, but its spiritual and cultural roots go back more than three thousand years. The historical experiences of the Jewish people, Jewish religion, and Jewish culture are all deeply connected to the Land of Israel. Since the beginning of Jewish history, the Jewish people have had a romance with the land promised them by the Bible,¹ and the modern country of Israel is the expression of that long historical drama. Today, Israel stands at the center of Jewish selfperception—how most Jews see themselves individually and collectively as a people. Israel is the stage on which Jewish life and peoplehood is playing out most vividly in the present, and the key to Jewish spiritual hopes for the future. In other words, Israel is the place that most intimately connects the Jewish past, present, and future. Grasping the reality of Israel and the Jewish people’s profound attachment to the Jewish State, then, means appreciating the Bible’s dream of the ideal covenantal Jewish society on the Promised Land, the Jewish people’s origins on the Land, the harsh Jewish experience in exile from the Land and the Jewish people’s heroic struggle for survival. Conversely, if we are to understand Jews and Judaism today, we must be aware of the hopes, dreams, and experiences that are located in contemporary Israel.

From whichever vantage point one views the Jewish State, it is clear that Israel carries two essential meanings for the Jewish people and the world. Israel is an indispensable part of the Bible’s ancient challenge to Abraham’s children to be a partner with God in a sacred covenant, in which the Jewish people are called to be a free self-determined people and to live as a kingdom of priests and a holy people (Exodus 19:6). As a sovereign Jewish homeland, Israel provides the Jewish people with a home for Jews fleeing persecution anywhere in the world. Sovereignty ensures that Jews will never again be forced to search for safety and acceptance. This is why only the reality of Israel can give real meaning to the Jewish people’s hope that their future will be more secure than their past.

Unfortunately, Israel has been wracked by war for much of its short life, since it was established in 1948. Even today, too few of Israel’s Arab neighbors have accepted the right of the Jewish State to exist. Transcending politics and economics, this ongoing conflict has exploited history, the Bible, theology, and national identities to produce polemical debate. As is often the case when ideology and rhetoric flourish, truth and understanding are the losers. As a result of the polemics, there is confusion regarding the political and religious realities of Israel.

Because Israel is at the center of Jewish life and identity, the Jewish State is crucial to relations between Jews and Christians. As we will see, the idea of Jews returning to their biblical homeland has long troubled Christian theologians. Some Protestant religious thinkers have difficulty connecting religion with sovereignty or national politics. Many Christians today see Israel as devoid of religious value, as a secular polity whose justification is no different from any other people’s: Jews deserve a country only because all people have a universal right to self-determination. Some nontraditional Jews also understand Israel only in political terms—as a well-deserved Jewish refuge after thousands of years of persecution and exile culminating in the Holocaust. Some contemporary Christian liberation theologians go to an extreme and refuse to acknowledge even this. They have teamed up with extremist postnationalists to reject the idea of a Jewish homeland and to deny Israel’s right to exist.

Neglecting the spiritual significance of Israel and seeing the country in exclusively political terms tends to polarize people who identify with the Jewish people against those who feel closer to the Palestinian people and the Muslim world. In the opposite direction, some evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jews view Israel in fundamentalist terms filled with messianic scenarios. So we arrive at a popular divide between some Protestant and liberal political leaders on the one hand, and Jews and conservative Christians on the other. This is still another tragic dimension of misunderstanding Israel. As Israel’s Declaration of Independence makes clear, from its very birth Israel saw no need to choose between her well-being and that of her Arab neighbors. In fact the opposite is true: Most Israelis know that peace and prosperity will only be achieved when Israelis, Palestinians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Jordanians, and Syrians accept one another’s right to live alongside their neighbors in safety and security.

Last, viewing Israel through political or fundamentalist lenses makes it difficult to appreciate how Jewish culture and tradition have understood the Bible, the Jewish people’s attachment to the Land, and the religious significance of Jewish political independence. Seeing the developing religious dimension of Israel helps us understand modern Judaism and the unique role of the Jewish people in religious history.

Are these three dimensions of Israel—the ancient religious, the modern political, and the future spiritual—related? This book strives to show that they are, and to explain how Israel has the potential to realize the Jewish ideal of integrating the spiritual and the physical, the holy and the mundane. The Jewish Connection to Israel, the Promised Land attempts to describe briefly how Judaism has understood the narrative of the Bible’s covenant and the role of the Jewish people in history, both of which involve the Land of Israel. As an independent Jewish homeland, Israel gives the Jewish people the first opportunity of national self-determination in almost two thousand years, to shape and live out its particular spiritual and national values. As a glimpse into the past and the present, the achievements and disappointments, joys and tragedies, dreams and realities of Israeli life today, The Jewish Connection to Israel, the Promised Land tries to express the personal hopes of Jews as well as the national drama of the Jewish people that unfolds every day in the Jewish State.

This book is about a people that has known too much bloodshed and persecution in its past, about its homeland in the Middle East, which is a region of constant violence, and the role this country can play in the future. I offer it in the hope that it will encourage greater knowledge of the Jewish people, and of Israel as a country whose security need not threaten its neighbors. If The Jewish Connection to Israel, the Promised Land contributes toward Jews’, Christians’, and all people’s understanding one another better, it will be no small contribution to realizing the noble dream of ancient prophets and modern idealists alike, that peace and justice reign throughout the world.

PART I

THE BIBLICAL DREAM

1

LAND AND COVENANT: THE BIBLE AND THE BIRTH OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE

THE BIBLE IS THE FOUNDATION OF JEWISH CULTURE, early Jewish history, and Jewish self-understanding. In fact, most of Jewish Scripture is devoted to telling the early history of the Jewish people, the only biblical people that has survived until today. The Bible describes the birth of the Jewish people—sometime during the Bronze Age around 1700 BCE¹—in God’s challenges and promises to Abraham, the father of the Jewish people. At the genesis of Jewish identity, God instructs the patriarch Abraham (then called Abram) to leave his native society of Mesopotamia in the region of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, travel westward, and begin a new people and a new culture in the Land of Canaan on the Mediterranean Sea:

The Lord said to Abram, Go out of your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and curse those you curse you; And all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you…. And the Lord appeared to Abram and said, I will assign this land to your offspring [emphasis mine]." (Genesis 12:1–3, 7)

Shortly thereafter, the Bible emphasizes that Abram and his people will inherit the land forever by virtue of the covenant:

The Lord said to Abram … Raise your eyes and look out from where you are, to the north and south, to the east and west, for I give all the land that you see to you and your offspring forever…. [Get] up, walk about the land, through its length and its breadth, for I give it to you. (Genesis 13:14–17)

Throughout Jewish history, religious and secular Jews alike have understood this account of Abraham’s journey as the beginning of their people’s story. The land to which Abram migrated later took the name Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel), after Abraham’s descendents, the Israelite people. The Bible describes God’s promise to Abraham as the beginning of a special covenantal relationship between God and the Jewish people. A covenant is a sacred contract, and as in every contract, each party acquires benefits in return for assuming responsibilities. For Abraham, the benefits of the covenant are clear: blessing, nationhood, and title to the Land. But Genesis 12 does not indicate any covenantal obligations or responsibilities that Abraham or his children must bear.

According to the covenant, Abraham and his descendants—the Jewish people—are destined to play a role in universal human history: You shall be a blessing…. All the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you(Genesis 12:2–3). The covenant demands that the Jewish people cannot be a parochial or ghetto people, or an insignificant footnote to the larger drama of humanity. God’s covenantal people must be a central actor in universal history. The Book of Genesis repeats this universal dimension of the covenant five times, twice more when God reestablishes the covenant with Abraham (18:18 and 22:17–22), when the covenant is passed to Abraham’s son, Isaac, (26:4), and in turn when it is bequeathed to Isaac’s son, Jacob (28:13–14). It seems clear that the Bible considers this universal role an essential part of Jewish covenantal destiny and mission. One of the Bible’s paradoxes is that the covenant asks a particular people in a particular place to have a universal mission and impact on human history.

It is also important that immediately after first hearing of the covenant, the Bible tells us that Abraham built an altar and called the name of God (Genesis 12:7–9). The Bible describes the covenant in Chapter 13, when Abraham again responds by calling the name of God. In other words, he makes the presence of God known to the people around him, bearing witness to the presence and majesty of God in the world. The phrase sounds Christian, but the idea of witness is authentic to Jewish Scripture and Judaism. Christianity borrowed this religious idea from its Jewish roots and applied it in different ways. A traditional rabbinic interpretation states that before Abraham, God was called ‘God of the heavens’; after Abraham, people called Him ‘God of the heavens and the earth.’² In other words, through the covenant, God challenged Abraham to teach the world that God dwells on earth—not just in heaven—and is a partner in human affairs.

LAND AS THE PLACE OF THE COVENANT

Jews know Jewish Scripture as Torah, which is Hebrew for teaching.³ (Christians have traditionally referred to the Hebrew Bible as the Old Testament, but many Christian scholars now more properly refer to it as Hebrew Scriptures or Shared Scriptures.) Almost every time the Torah refers to the covenant, the gift of the Land is mentioned. This is true throughout Genesis: God tells Abraham his descendants will be strangers in a foreign land but will return home to reclaim the Land (15:13–18); when God tells Isaac that he will inherit his father’s divine legacy but that he may not leave the Land (Genesis 26:1–5); God informs Jacob, Isaac’s son, that he will bear the covenant of Abraham (Genesis 28:13–15); Jacob tells his son, Joseph the viceroy of Egypt, that God will bring him back to the land of his fathers to continue the covenant (Genesis 48:21).

One of the central motifs of the Book of Exodus is the liberation from Egyptian slavery so that Jews may live free in the land of their ancestors. This is announced early in Exodus.

Reviews for The Jewish Connection to Israel, the Promised Land

[terribooks · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

3700 years of history in 150 pages -- it is of necessity going to be a "brief introduction." This is probably a worthwhile book for anyone who doesn't have much knowledge of the history of the Old Testament, or of the Jewish Diaspora. A good third of the book is devoted to the establishment of the modern nation of Israel and its history.The author tends to strengthen arguments which support the ancient Jewish connection to the land of Israel. For example, he claims that "except for some seventy years, Jewish sovereignty was continuous until 67 CE" (page 25). I wouldn't consider the centuries as continuous sovereignty, when under the rule of Persian, Greek and Roman empires. He attributes the increasing Arab population in Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the improved economic and agricultural environment provided by Jews returning to an empty land, answering arguments that the Jews took over land belonging to Palestinians. An early chapter relates the Jewish covenant relationship with God to the concreteness of the specific Land. This is the strongest part of the book. Korn's explanation of how the Land is transformed, in Christianity, to the Body of Christ, concrete for abstract, provides a useful basis for those of us with Christian backgrounds and understandings to grasp the significance of Israel to the Jewish people.