Parshat Toldot
By: Rabbi Moshe Goodman, Kollel Ohr Shlomo, Hebron
בס"ד
לשכנו תדרשו
Seeking the Holy Presence in Our Holy Land
"וירא אליו ה' ויאמר אל תרד מצרימה שכן בארץ אשר אומר אליך"
"And may our eyes see in Your return to Zion with compassion. Blessed are You HaShem who returns His Holy Presence to Zion."
These words formulate in all our prayers the constant yearning our People have for the return of the Holy Presence to Zion, Jerusalem and our Holy Land. As we explained last year, our Sages interpret God's command (in our title quote) to Yitzhak to 'dwell - shechon
- in the Land' as a command 'to make the Shechina dwell in the Land'.[1]
Indeed, this imperative applies to all Israel as we say in Tehillim: "Trust in HaShem and do good; dwell in the land and be nourished by faith", on which are Sages remark, 'dwell - shechon - make the Shechina dwell in the Land'.[2]
As we have shown many times before, it is by having trust in HaShem especially in His Land of Providence and doing good therein that one 'dwells in the Land', makes the Shechina rest among us, leading to the real and palpable nourishment of faith in our lives.
Similarly, just as Yitzhak was commanded not to leave the Holy Land, so too halacha bids us not to leave our Holy Land, save a few exceptional cases, as Rambam rules: "It is forbidden to leave Eretz Yisrael for the Diaspora at all times except: to study Torah; to marry; or to save one's property from the gentiles. After accomplishing these objectives, one must return to Eretz Yisrael. Similarly, one may leave Eretz Yisrael to conduct commercial enterprises. However, it is forbidden to leave with the intent of settling permanently in the Diaspora unless the famine in Eretz Yisrael is so severe that a dinar's
worth of wheat is sold at two dinarim ... Though it is permitted to leave
Eretz Yisrael under these circumstances, it is not pious behavior. Behold, Machlon and Kilyon were two of the great men of the generation and they left Eretz Yisrael only out of great distress. Nevertheless, they were found worthy of death by God". [3]
Simply, this does not mean that leaving the Land has liability of death, God forbid, but rather that Divine judgment was harsher on them because of their departure, especially in context of their high ('great men') position. Interestingly, we see that just as Machlon's downfall was in his departure from the Land of Israel, so too his widow Ruth's ascent to (solid) conversion, 'under the 'wings' of the Holy Presence', began with the ascent to the Land of Israel, as her first words of devotion prove, "where you go I shall go", simply referring to the Land of Israel. Therefore, it is not surprising that Ruth is buried in Hebron, the symbol of our people's age-old connection to our Holy Land, the Land of the Holy Presence.
Real Stories from the Holy Land #42: "My brother-in-law sent a set of seforim from Northern Israel with a messenger just before 'Shabbat Hebron' last week to Kiryat Arba. My brother-in-law does not know where I live in Kiryat Arba, so he definitely did not know where to direct his messenger. Suddenly, after not talking for several hours, while I was returning home from buying popsicles from the neighborhood's kiosk, my brother-in-law called to give me the messenger's cell-phone number. I called just then and it 'turns out' that out of the thousands of possible meters this messenger could have been in Kiryat Arba, he 'happened' to be next to the mikveh, at the same time I also "happened" to be there about 25 meters away."
[1]Breshit Raba 64, 3
[2]Tanhuma Reeh, 11
[3]Rambam, Melachim veMilchamot 5, 9- in the past we noted that there are poskim who permit more reasons to leave, but all opinions agree that to leave for mere leisure is forbidden.
