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and go to the land that I will show you. And I will make of thee a great nation. . . . And the Lord
appeared unto Abraham, and said: 'Unto thy seed will I give this land.'”
That “promised land” was pledged in turn to Isaac: “Sojourn in this land, and I will be with
thee, and will bless thee; for unto thee, and unto thy seed, I will give all these lands, and I will
establish the oath which I swore unto Abraham thy father.”
The purpose of the exodus from Egypt, the Torah says, is to have Moses lead the Israelites
back to the Land of Israel. When they arrive, the Lord says to Joshua: “You and all these people,
get ready to cross the Jordan River into the land I am about to give to them — to the Israelites.
I will give you every place where you set your foot, as I promised Moses.”
It is in this land where the anointed kings, Saul, David, and Solomon, ruled. There, in Je-
rusalem, the First Temple was built, and then the Second Temple after the fi rst was destroyed.
These Temples were each built not merely as another shrine but — as the Bible repeatedly
makes clear — as a center of Judaism so overwhelmingly important that no other place of wor-
ship should exist. Indeed, the topics of Ezra and Nehemiah describe the return of some of the
Jews from Babylon and their rebuilding of the Temple.
All the prophets, too, saw a common identity between the Jewish people, the Jewish reli-
gion, and the Land of Israel, to which Jews were fated to return. Psalm 137 says, “If I forget thee,
O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.”
The prophet Ezekiel said the Lord showed him the valley of the bones, and the bones came
together and returned to life: “These bones are the whole house of Israel; and they are saying,
'Our bones have dried up, our hope is gone, and we are completely cut off.' Therefore proph-
esy; say to them that [the Lord] says, 'My people! I will open your graves and make you get up
out of your graves, and I will bring you into the land of Israel.”
The post-exilic literature continued these themes. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai said the Land
of Israel was one of the great gifts given by the Supreme Being. Rabbi Nachshon Gaon, living in
ninth-century Iraq, wrote that every Jew has a personal inheritance of part of the land. Many of
the rabbis most respected for religious scholarship repeated the injunction that to live in that
land was a duty, and some went to live there themselves.
Whether one accepts this long and deeply held religious view as divinely ordained or as an
expression of the history of a community, its power and centrality for the Jewish people should
be clear. Only with the rise of assimilationism and other ideologies in the second half of the
nineteenth century did any Jew even think to question it. The debate was not over the central-
ity of the return to Israel but rather over its accomplishment —whether it might be brought
about by human action or by the Messiah.
The imagery of Jerusalem and the Land of Israel was thus omnipresent in faith, belief,
and texts and was renewed daily by all Jews no matter where they lived. Long before the cre-
ation of a Zionist movement, the eyes of Jews everywhere were turned toward Jerusalem.
Not until the late nineteenth century, with the development of conscious nationalism in Eu-
rope, the entrance of Jews into mainstream society, and the opening of a somewhat secular
approach to Jewish identity, did a political nationalist movement develop with the aim of
returning Jews to Israel and creating a nation-state there through human organization and
action.
 
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