Last week, I attended a celebration marking the completion of Sefer Yehoshua (the Book of Joshua) in my daughter’s third-grade class. The event had originally been scheduled for the month of Adar, but was postponed because of the war. When my daughter was upset about the delay, I told her: “You know, this war is itself the completion of Sefer Yehoshua. In these very days, we are privileged to complete the conquest that Yehoshua began. We are fulfilling Hashem’s command to remove those who obstruct our settlement of the land, and we constantly pray that we will soon merit celebrating the conclusion of the war, once it has fully completed what is written in Sefer Yehoshua.”
I felt that even if the disappointment over the postponed celebration remained, my nine-year-old daughter had now been given meaning and context. The book had been connected to life. The war had been given a deeper frame.
It was with this sense of elevation that I came to the celebration: with profound gratitude to Hashem, Who has privileged us to study Sefer Yehoshua on the soil of the Holy Land, and to be part of a generation fighting wars our ancestors could scarcely have imagined. Yet the loftiness I felt upon entering was matched by the deep contraction I felt as I left.
The Missing Core of Sefer Yehoshua
The celebration opened with a rhymed recitation beginning with the words, “Not exposition is the main thing, but action.” The girls then sang, with sweet motions and heartfelt sincerity, a “song of lessons,” presenting the various lessons they had learned from Sefer Yehoshua.
The lessons were many and varied. First and foremost, of course, was the message: “This book of the Torah shall not depart from your mouth; you shall meditate upon it day and night.” Later came the message of “You shall not turn aside from the matter they tell you, right or left,” derived from the fact that in every circumstance the people listen to Yehoshua and do not depart from his command. There was also the important message of Shabbat observance: the people are distressed that they may need to desecrate Shabbat in the war against the kings of the south, so Yehoshua extends Friday by declaring, “Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and moon, in the Valley of Ayalon.” There were other messages too, some more ingenious than others, about guarding one’s tongue, the power of prayer, and more.
But one message—minor and negligible, apparently—was absent from the magnificent song, and from all the other charming songs that followed: the message of the Land of Israel, of conquering the land, of the privilege of dwelling on its soil, and of our responsibility to settle it.
Sefer Yehoshua, the great Book of Conquest, became, according to this festive siyum, a collection of Midrashic and rabbinic lessons. The Land of Israel was barely noted. A map of the land did appear in one scene, in which the tribal portions were revealed through riddles and clues. But the map was small, placed behind the girls’ backs, and removed immediately after the names of the tribes had been attached to their allotted regions. Wars were not mentioned, except for the battle of Jericho (and its miraculous conquest), to which an entire scene was devoted. Alongside it came the clear message, sung again and again: “Not by might and not by war; we shall triumph only through the power of Torah.”
So what was presented, you may ask? For one, the story of Achsah, according to the Midrash. To recall: her father sought a Torah scholar for her and declared that whoever conquered Kiryat Sefer would marry her. After her marriage to Othniel ben Kenaz, her sole aspiration was that he should study Torah day and night, free from the burdens of livelihood. She therefore asked her father for a portion of land with ample natural water, and even received it. There was also a play about Rachab and the scarlet thread—“If your sins be like scarlet, they shall become white as snow”—and even a scene about “Pinchas is Eliyahu,” accompanied by the song “Behold, I send you Eliyahu the prophet.”
How did we take the first book of the Prophets, whose direct message is a piercing demand for conquest and settlement, for war against evil and the expulsion of enemies, and turn it into a book that is only homiletics?
But wars? Conquest? Settlement of the land? Soldiers killed for its sanctity? Enemies trying to drive us from it? Hashem’s command to fight and the divine assistance granted in response to human effort? No and no.
If in ordinary times, the missing essence of the book would be disturbing and would raise a serious question, then in wartime—at a celebration that had been postponed because of the war with Iran, and whose very possibility remained uncertain until the last moment—all the more so.
How did we take the first book of the Prophets, whose direct message is a piercing demand for conquest and settlement, for war against evil and the expulsion of enemies, and turn it into a book that is only homiletics? Or, to paraphrase the sentence with which the celebration began: How did we make exposition the main event, while omitting the deed entirely?
Of course, one can speak at length about the roots of this phenomenon. One can speak about the Jewish people in exile, forced to interpret the Land of Israel as a spiritual “aspect” of reality; about the wars of Hashem described in the sacred books, translated into the war against the evil inclination, since that was the only battlefield available to us in exile. One can understand how this interpretive mode, which distanced the text from its plain meaning to preserve its relevance, has continued to accompany us after nearly two thousand years of exile.
But the truth is that these explanations can no longer serve as a justification.
Detachment as a System
The magnificent “song of lessons” gave tangible expression to the core problem of Haredi society: detachment. Not detachment as a bug or a failure, but detachment as a method, as a way of life. The more detached you are, the more Haredi you are.
That same allegorical reading of Torah, which was once necessary in order to settle the Torah upon the heart and connect people to it, now distances Torah from life. It turns Torah into a collection of empty slogans that never meet reality. A Torah that is in heaven. A Torah that is across the sea. A Torah that is not translated into the life of action.
This detachment leaves reality in the hands of political commentators and assorted superficial voices. Furthermore, its costs are not only material. They are above all spiritual, because it leads to moral distortion.
This detachment leaves reality in the hands of political commentators and assorted superficial voices. Furthermore, its costs are not only material. They are above all spiritual, because it leads to moral distortion.
At first, you argue that there is no need to fight the enemy because “Torah protects.” Later, you come to believe that there is also no need to feel gratitude toward the soldiers who fight, since they are acting only on their own behalf, and had they dedicated themselves to Torah study, there would have been no need for any of it. From there, even praying for them becomes an insufficiently spiritual position. And so the heart becomes distorted. It hardens. It loses its natural Jewish warmth: its sense of mutual responsibility, its feeling, its mercy, its modesty, and its kindness.
Recently, I listened to an episode of Gadi Taub’s “Shomer Saf” podcast, in which Minister Bezalel Smotrich was the guest. Smotrich used the metaphor of a hitchhiker to describe religious Zionism. A hitchhiker feels uncomfortable: he will not open a window without permission, and he will not ask to turn on the air conditioning. Likewise, the moment the car turns in the wrong direction for him, he asks to get out. The religious-Zionist public, Smotrich argued, is not a hitchhiker. It does not get out of the car of the Jewish state when the car turns in a direction it dislikes. It feels at home. It is part of the story. It will open a window, turn on the air conditioning, and even take the wheel when necessary.
If we continue the comparison, it seems that our Haredi educational institutions educate our children into the consciousness of the hitchhiker: you do not truly belong here. When there is a turn you dislike, you can thus threaten to leave the country, remember how great it was in exile, and long to return to it.
Connecting to the Land
Recently, to my great sorrow, I encountered up close a trend among Haredi children of setting open land on fire. The trend reminded me of a cartoon published about two years ago, during a period of massive fires in the Jerusalem forests. It depicted two women standing before King Solomon in the famous trial, each claiming the land belonged to her. The Jewish woman nurtures the land and protects it from harm, while the Arab woman pours kerosene on it and sets it aflame.
I remembered this difficult image in light of this new and troubling trend. Do our children feel so little connection to the land? So little responsibility for its wellbeing, and for the wellbeing of those who live upon it?
The hitchhiker consciousness stands in absolute opposition to what the reality collapsing before our eyes demands of us: Take responsibility.
The hitchhiker consciousness stands in absolute opposition to what the reality collapsing before our eyes demands of us: Take responsibility. Take responsibility by the power of Torah, by the power of the Prophets, by the power of the Writings.
This is our task: not to leave Torah in the heavens, but to bring it into the soil of the Land, into the courage of battle, into the responsibility of settlement, and into the moral life of a people living before Hashem.
This is the central message of Sefer Yehoshua—as it is of the Torah as a whole.
This is what happens when Charedim have no appreciation of what has happened in their world since 1948
May I suggest that if you learn the magisterial commentary of Ramban on the Torah you cannot ignore so much in that commentary about the importance of Land of Israel as the true locus of Avodas HaShem and the active as opposed to passive role of Am Yisrael in that role