The Body of Israel

Shmuel Chaim Naiman

The word Israel refers to two things:

1. The Nation of Israel, known today as Jews. Yaakov received this name from Hashem’s messenger (Bereishit 32:29), and his descendants adopted this name for their nation.
2. The Land of Israel, whose borders very roughly correspond to those of the modern State of Israel.

Jewish History – The Nation and the Land

The history of the Jewish people is the evolving relationship between these two meanings of Israel. Already from the Humash, it is clear how the arc of the Torah’s history bends in one direction: the People of Israel reaching, inheriting, and living in the Land of Israel.

• Hashem’s first recorded words to our first forefather were: “Go… to the land that I will show you” (Bereishit 12:1).
• Hashem repeatedly promised Avraham, Yitzhak, and Yaakov a nation as numerous as the stars and sands, and that that nation would inherit the land of Canaan (Bereishit 22:17, 26:4, 28:14; Shemot 32:13). Sometimes He emphasized the Land more than the Nation, as in the berit bein ha-betarim (Bereishit 15).
• Yaakov’s offspring multiplied in Egypt to become a nation of slaves, and were transformed to God’s nation by the Exodus. Why did they leave Egypt? To go to Israel (Devarim 6:23).^[1]
• Many mitzvot involve life in Israel: agriculture, society, government, and the rituals of the Beit Ha-Mikdash. All the rest were meant to be experienced in Israel; we do them in exile to practice for our return.^[2]

The root of all our nation’s troubles—two exiles, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, pogroms, and our current tragedy—is our distance from the Land and its spiritual values. Another large chunk of the Torah is devoted to telling that story: When Moshe’s failed spies stoked fear of the Canaanites, Israel the Nation spent the night of the ninth of Av crying to return to Egypt. Hashem’s immediate response was to keep them in the desert for 40 years until a new generation was born, and the long-term repercussions were millennia of painful exile and torment (see Tehillim 106:24-27).^[3] On that day, many years later, both Batei Mikdash were destroyed (Sanhedrin 104b; Bamidbar Rabbah 16:20).

These observations have nothing to do with religious Jews’ various opinions about modern political Zionism. You can believe the State of Israel is the harbinger of Mashiah, the worst desecration of Hashem’s name in history, or anything in between, but the fact remains: there is no story of Israel the People disconnected from Israel the Land.

Why a Land?

We might be so used to identifying the Nation with the Land that we never stop to wonder why they always go together. What would Judaism lack if we received the Torah on just any mountain – say, in the Sinai desert – and then returned to civilization (anywhere!) to live as good Jews? Indeed, we have been scattered everywhere for more than half of the 3,331 years since we received the Torah and we continue to survive. Why couldn’t that always have been the plan? Why should spiritual beliefs be confined to borders of dirt and water? Doesn’t Hashem transcend those confines?

In this essay, I will present a simple yet profound answer to this question, based on the Kuzari and the works of the Vilna Ga’on.

The view of the Elah Valley from Khirbet Qeiyafa, an ancient town dating back to the era of David and Golyat.

One Jewish Person

The Jewish nation is not a collective of many individuals who share a common history, philosophy, or set of morals. We are not even a nation in the regular sense of the term.

Hashem instructed Moshe to tell Pharaoh in His first message to the Egyptian king: “My firstborn son is Israel” (Shemot 4:22). The Jewish nation is as a single living human form—a “son”—that reaches farther and higher than any individual person can ever hope to reach with the individual’s own limited mind and abilities. We—all of us together—know and emulate Hashem by learning and living His Torah. “Israel camped there, next to the mountain [of Sinai]—as one person, with one heart.”^[4]

Soul and Body

How exactly is Israel a single human life? It is easy to see how a unified nation possesses a common soul: nations and souls are metaphysical concepts that exist beyond the material world. To glimpse the oneness of Israel the Nation, just observe the love and support pouring out from Jews everywhere since the war that began on October 7, 2023.

But where is the body of Israel? It is great to have a common soul somewhere up in heaven, and to occasionally see its effects down here. But we are human people living inside physical bodies. Everything we do, for better or worse, happens in the material world.

For the Torah to guide Israel the Nation as one life, we must have a common body that we can see, touch, feel, and care for together.

That Body is the Land of Israel.

Israel the Nation breathes life into Israel the Land through living there by Hashem’s will, as expressed in its special Torah laws. We give form and purpose to this little corner of the material world.

Israel the Nation also needs this material home where its spiritual ideals are grounded – literally! – in physical earth. The Land gives the Nation its body, an island of unity in a world of separation and conflict.

Death and Life

With many bumps, fits, and starts, this was the state of affairs for some 1,300 years, until the destruction of the Second Beit Ha-Mikdash sent everything crashing down in heaps of stones and buckets of tears that get higher and fuller every day.

The Jewish people today are scattered all over the world. We are also separate from each other in body, mind, and spirit, and unfathomably distant from oneness with God and His Torah. We cannot agree on how to serve the God of Israel, or even whether such a God exists for us to serve.

Without our unified body and soul, Israel’s Nation and Land have lost their human form. One might almost say that Israel has died, which is the natural outcome of any soul leaving its body.

But we are not quite dead. Instead, as the Kuzari (2:34) explains, we are a terminally ill patient: the doctors have given up hope, yet we still hang on, trusting in a miracle. Like the dried bones of Yehezkel’s vision (37:3) that returned  to life, we too will return to our original human form.

Throughout all the exiles, we remain tethered to the Land: Jews all over the world live, pray, and die for it, and study its special laws. And in the past century, millions of Jews have returned to Israel, many for the purpose of finding Hashem there. While the fragmented pieces of Israel’s soul search for their body, the body eagerly waits for its children’s united revival and return.

The Anatomy of Israel

This perspective on the Land of Israel might sound strange. Israel is a land of earth and water: what is human about it? To understand Israel as a living, breathing body, we must expand our conception of body. Not every human body looks exactly like yours and mine, but they all share some common characteristics.

Anatomy textbooks teach that all human life processes happen in three vertically arranged cavities. Everything else protects and transports these three containers of life:

• The cranial cavity primarily holds the brain – life’s management center that interprets stimuli from the environment, decides how to respond, and commands the relevant organs to act.
• The thoracic cavity holds the lungs and heart – the flow of life itself, constantly entering, exiting, and circulating. Here we experience the emotions and personality traits that originate from our brain’s perceptions and reactions.
• The abdominopelvic cavity holds the digestive and reproductive systems that sustain life and seek to live forever through offspring. There is no mind or heart here. This is the body of the body, so to speak: raw, visceral, sensual, instinctual, desirous.

Notice the differences between the cavities’ location, colors, and texture:

• The cranial cavity contains one white organ that is as pure and mysterious as the consciousness it holds. It rises above the rest of the body, separated by the thin avenue we call the neck.
• Moving downwards, we first reach the thoracic cavity. The heart is a more complicated character: a single, life-holding organ – but red and bloody. Instead of one single king ruling from its cranial-cavity throne, here three musicians play together the symphony of life.
• Finally, we cross over the diaphragm, enter the abdominopelvic cavity, and cleanliness and simplicity disappear altogether. The many organs here grind and absorb food, churn out putrid waste, filter the blood, and send all the extras downward and outward.

The cranial and abdominopelvic cavities teach that human life is both simple and complicated, clean and messy, white and red, wisdom and desires. But life is not only a superficial dichotomy of disconnected, contradictory parts, because the independent thoracic cavity holds everything together in harmony.

The heart of life – literally! – mediates between the white pureness of wisdom and the blind darkness of instincts. Through the breath, heartbeat, and emotions, the brain and mind reach out and guide life’s most remote reaches, directing our desires with balance and purpose. The body’s anatomy thus reflects the anatomy of the soul.

Israel’s Three Regions

According to the Vilna Ga’on,^[5] the Land of Israel contains these three parts of human life in the three regions delineated by the Mishnah regarding different areas of Jewish law (Shevi’it 6:1, 9:2; Bava Batra 3:2).

• The land’s cranial cavity holds Jerusalem: from there the divine presence – as expressed by the Temple service, Davidic kings, and the Sanhedrin – guided the entire country’s Jewish life. The region surrounding Jerusalem is called Judah after the tribe that lived in most of Israel’s southern half.
• The land’s thoracic cavity is the windswept hills of the Galilee that breathe air and life into the land. The many Mishnaic and Talmudic Sages who lived there, and later the brilliant Kabbalists of Safed, taught most of the Torah’s Oral Tradition – the beating pulse of Jewish life on earth.
• Ever Ha-Yarden, the Transjordan, is Israel’s stretched diaphragm, cleanly separating the brain and heart from Israel’s abdominopelvic cavity. This region stretches across most of modern Jordan and large swaths of Iraq and Syria, ending at the Euphrates River.

Although most of Ever Ha-Yarden is not within the modern State of Israel, it is part of the biblical Land of Israel. Two-and-a-half of Israel’s twelve tribes called it home (Bamidbar 32).^[6]Yet it has always been regarded as secondary to the rest of the country, just as the abdominopelvic cavity holds the lowest aspects of our lives. For example, Moshe was forbidden to enter Israel proper – but conquered (and is buried in) Ever Ha-Yarden.

Altogether, Israel’s body contains all three facets of human life, neatly arranged as in every human body. The message is clear: your Jewish identity is right here on earth, and reaches every area of your life: mind, feelings, and instincts. Do not run to heaven to find Hashem, for He is right here in Israel the Land.

Hashem chose an earthly people to be His nation, not angels in heaven. Just as the Nation of Israel will live forever, so too the precious Land of Israel will forever be the center of our story, the body of our soul.

^[1] See also Ramban to Shemot 3:12, s.v. “va-yomer.”

^[2] See Rashi to Devarim 11:18, s.v. “ve-samtem et devarai”; Ramban to Vayikra 18:25, s.v. “va-titma ha-aretz.”

^[3] See Maharal, Netzah Yisrael ch. 8 s.v. “ve-ka’amar be-tet be-av.”

^[4] Rashi to Shemot 19:2, s.v. “va-yihan sham Yisra’el.”

^[5]  Aderet Eliyahu to Eikhah 1:2, s.v. “kol rei’eha bagedu vah.”

^[6] To learn more about the three regions of biblical Israel and their boundaries, including the halakhic and spiritual status of Ever Ha-Yarden, see my book, Land of Health: Israel’s War for Wellness (Menucha Publishers, 2024), ch. 4 and Appendix.