A couple of years ago, PBS aired a special series about the care of the earth and the climate crisis that people are facing all over the world. It was called “Peril and Promise: In Their Element.” And the promotional ad spotlighted, quote, “indigenous leaders who work to protect these elements that sustain life.” According to the promo, “for people whose existence is inseparable from their native land, the climate crisis is not a tale of the future; it’s the present.”[1]
This got me thinking about the peril and promise in the elements of Sefer Bamidbar, the biblical Book of Numbers, which we begin reading tonight. For it, too, deals with the natural elements of the earth and Eretz Yisrael and the indigenous people – that is, the people of Israel – who are sworn by God to protect it.
The natural elements are highlighted in midrash – rabbinic explanations about the Torah texts – that begin this book:
א וַיְדַבֵּר יְהוָֹה אֶל־מֹשֶׁה בְּמִדְבַּר סִינַי
And God spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai
Why does God speak in the wilderness of Sinai, the rabbis ask? And they answer:
“From here the Sages taught that the Torah was given with three elements: With fire, with water and in wilderness” And then they explain:
“With fire, because Mount Sinai was all smoke, as the Eternal descended upon it in fire.
With water, as it is stated, Indeed, the heavens dripped; the clouds dripped water.
In the wilderness, as God says right here, God spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai.”[2]
So three of the four elements of the natural world – minus air – are crucial to the covenant between God and the Israelite people. But even more so, they are crucial to the land that God promised to them, and to which Moses is leading them – Eretz Yisrael. Because these forty years in the wilderness are all designed to prepare the people of Israel to move into the land, settle the land, and protect the land in all generations, at all cost.
‘Indigenous leaders who work to protect these elements that sustain life.”
“People whose existence is inseparable from their native land.”
If that does not describe the people of Israel, I don’t know who it does.
I shouldn’t have to say this again, but apparently I do:
Despite the recent efforts of anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian (and often pro-Hamas) demonstrators – including those who invaded the president’s office at Stanford this week — we cannot forget that Israelis are indigenous to the land we call Israel, and have been for four thousand years. Abraham, according to our tradition, lived in the land in the 18th century BCE. The Exodus from Egypt and the return to the land happened in the 14th century BCE.
The period of the judges starts in 1200 BCE, and around 1000 BCE, King David made Jerusalem his capital. David’s reign is well attested in relics recovered from digs in Jerusalem over many years. So is the reign of King Hezekiah, who fought off the Assyrian army in the 700s BCE. So is the rebuilding of the Temple in the mid-5th century BCE and the subsequent conquest by Rome, which destroyed the Second Temple and the self-determination of the Jews of Israel in 70 CE.
Over two-thousand years, we Jews yearned for a return to our homeland, which finally happened in 1948. Since then – when combined Arab armies tried and failed to wipe us off the earth in the first of many such wars – we have done what it takes, whatever it takes, to protect the fire, the water and the land.
Contrary to what modern antisemites would have people believe, Zionism and Jewish control of Eretz Yisrael is not a settler-colonial construct. As the Anti-Defamation League explains:
“Unlike European settler colonial powers, the modern Zionist movement’s raison d’etre was never to subjugate the existing population and steal their resources and land holdings. Instead, attempts were made at coexistence and interdependent development . . . Ascribing the term “settler colonialism” to such activity is also a distortion. Should a mutually negotiated two-state solution establish a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel, it will likely encompass most of the West Bank, but such an outcome does not negate the spiritual, historical, and cultural connection to that land, that Jews cherished for millennia.”[3]
Our people living in our land, protecting earth, air, fire and water – those elements that sustain life. That’s as anti-colonialist as you can get.
And so we go back to the beginning of this parashah, which begins the Book of Numbers: And God spoke to Moses in the Desert of Sinai.
Rabbi Meir Shapiro, who taught in Poland and is buried in Jerusalem, lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, before the two millennia of Jewish yearning for their land came to fruition. In teaching that the Torah was given in fire, water and desert, he wrote:
“The Torah was given to the Jewish people to be observed at all times and under all conditions . . . The history of our people, from the appearance of the first Jew, Abraham, with his belief in the One God, until our days, shows this willingness.”[4]
Today, we still follow the path of Torah through earth, fire and water, to fulfill the mitzvot that link us to the land and the worldwide People of Israel: kindness, generosity, self-sacrifice, honesty. We may not agree with everything that the current government – or any government – of the State of Israel says or does. But that does not mean we love Israel – the state and the land – any less. And we pray for her to maintain both strength and decency, peril and promise. These, too, are elements that sustain life.
Ken yehi ratson. May this be God’s will and our mission here on earth. And let us say together: Amen.
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©2024 Audrey R. Korotkin
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/peril-and-promise/series/in-their-element-earth-air-fire-water/
[2] Bamidbar Rabbah 1:7.
[3] https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/allegation-israel-settler-colonialist-enterprise?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwmYCzBhA6EiwAxFwfgPcmdibMrAwqWGg_ZSENU-5PWRlvoAAMpD6o4pkiFmJ2ppLgl0SgshoC_9oQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
[4] Torah Gems Volume III, compiled by Aharon Yaakov Greenberg and translated by Rabbi Dr. Shmuel Himelstein (Tel Aviv: Yavneh Publishing House, 1992), p. 7.
Rabbi Audrey Korotkin 
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