Israel: Heart of the World

By Moshe Feiglin

"See I have given before you today life and good and death and bad." (From this week's Torah portion, Netzvim, Deuteronomy 30:15)

Don't we know that life is good and death is bad? Not really. Our natural will is to stop living and to merely exist. In other words, to stop working and to just be passive; to shed responsibility. To live, we must preserve a state of separation or differentiation. The world was created in a process that separated light from darkness, heaven from earth and land from water. A living organism lives in the same way: it is created from the repeated differentiation of cells. But our natural predisposition is toward osmosis - blending in and returning to the chaos that preceded life.

The choice of life requires unending energy to guard the separation. Our natural urge is to bow out of this struggle for life and to dream of a world that has no separations, no good or bad, no heaven or hell, no countries or religions, no men or women. Imagine.

So yes. It is very easy to become confused and to think that death is good and that life is bad.

"I bring as witnesses to you today the heavens and the earth, I have set life and death before you, blessing and curse, and you shall choose life so that you and your offspring may live. To love Hashem your G-d, to listen to His voice and to cling to Him, for He is your life and the length of your days to dwell on the Land that Hashem your G-d has vowed to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob, to give it to them." (ibid, 19-20).

Israel among the nations is like the heart in the body. Their Land, the Land of Israel, is the heart of all the lands of the earth. It is the Land of Life, the beating heart that enlivens creation.

If Jews thought that they could live here in the Land of Israel, like just another 'normal' nation, reality has come along and poked its finger in our collective eye. The Land is slowly but surely being taken away from us.

Guarding the heart is not like guarding the external organs. It takes less energy to preserve the separations between them. To live in the Land of Israel, we must actively and supremely choose life. Then we will merit to live for eternity in the Land of our forefathers.

Shabbat Shalom