What Israel means to the Jewish people: Beyond politics and borders - opinion

Israel is many things to many people. Arguments continue over who the land belongs to, where its borders should be drawn, when the modern state actually started, how the country ought to be governed, and why it needs to exist in the first place.

Few people pause to ask the plain question of what Israel is. Every Jew should spend some time discussing that question and forming an answer of their own. The place is taken for granted all too often, and it rarely receives the personal contemplation it deserves. As a place that means so much to every Jew, people should think about what Israel is to them.

People describe Israel as the ancestral homeland. Jews have pointed to this land for generations as the ground their forefathers entered after leaving Egypt, the hills and valleys they cultivated through seasons of plenty and drought, and the cities they built and rebuilt across the long biblical period.

That deep family history running from the earliest settlements through later returns is what makes the country feel like the starting point of the Jewish story rather than a destination chosen in some later century.

The land is given to the Jewish people by God. From the first covenant with Abraham through the repeated assurances to Isaac and Jacob and then to the nation standing ready to cross the Jordan, the Torah presents the country as a divine allocation rather than a territory acquired by ordinary human means.

Those who hold the texts as authoritative find in that origin a claim rooted in the sources themselves, one that later political arguments must still contend with even when they reject the premise.

Importance of Israel to the Jewish people

Israel is a place of safety for the Jewish people. After centuries in which Jewish communities lived under the protection of foreign rulers whose tolerance could disappear with a change in ruler or mood, the country provides a state in which basic security rests in Jewish hands and Jewish institutions.

The shift from dependence on the goodwill of others to the capacity to protect one’s own is one of the clearest practical reasons many Jews regard the country’s existence as essential to Jewish life.

It is a place of sovereignty and self-governance for Jews. A Jewish majority now determines the laws that govern daily life, selects the leaders who set policy, and decides the national priorities without an external authority holding the final word over those choices.

That ordinary and continuous work of running a country is what allows a people long accustomed to living under the rule of others to take direct responsibility for its own direction and its own mistakes.

Israel is a place where Jews have a right to defend themselves. When attacks come across borders or from within, the response is carried out by Jewish forces operating under Jewish command rather than by appeals to outside powers whose interests and timelines may differ from those of the people under fire.

The fact that self-defense is both practically possible and widely recognized as legitimate has altered the inner calculation many Jews make about their own vulnerability and about the limits of what they must accept.

The country is the home of Jews for thousands of years. Archaeological work continues to uncover remains of Jewish life from every major era, ancient texts preserve detailed memory of attachment to specific places, and small communities remained on the land even through the long stretches of foreign rule and major expulsions.

That unbroken, if sometimes thin presence is why the 20th-century return strikes many observers as a people reclaiming a house they had never entirely abandoned rather than arriving as strangers to an empty landscape.

Israel is a place of geographical beauty for the Jewish people to unite. The varied terrain running from the central hills through the coastal plain to the southern desert and the northern valleys gives Jews arriving from every continent a shared physical world they can walk, farm, and build upon together.

Moving through those same hills and shorelines creates a common set of experiences and memories that pure discussion of ideas seldom manages to produce on its own.

It is a home where Jews belong. In most other countries, Jewish identity remains something that often requires explanation, accommodation, or quiet adjustment to the surrounding culture, while inside Israel the Jewish calendar, language, and ordinary assumptions form the background of daily public life.

That simple alignment between who a person is and the society around him is what many who move there describe as the change that finally lets them stop translating themselves for others.

The land is sanctified. Jewish sources assign the territory a distinct status that shapes specific agricultural rules, the calendar and obligation of pilgrimage, and the ordinary awareness a person carries while living and working on the soil.

For those who follow Jewish tradition, that sanctity is a concrete condition of the place itself rather than an abstract quality one might attach to any meaningful location.

Israel is a place where you can connect to God in the most unique way. The same daily prayers, the same hours of Torah study, and the same rhythm of the agricultural year all gain an added layer of immediacy when they are carried out on the land the sources identify as the focal point of Jewish religious attention.

Israel is the land of Divine providence, where God’s “eyes” are always upon it. To be in the land is to be automatically connected to God.

It is a place of mitzvot. Several specific commandments can be observed only within the borders of the land, and many others acquire greater weight and additional details when they are kept inside those same borders rather than elsewhere.

That practical and ongoing religious dimension is one further reason the country remains central for Jews who organize significant parts of their lives around the obligations recorded in the tradition.

These different descriptions sit alongside one another in the minds of people who care about the place. Working through them for oneself keeps Israel from becoming only a political argument or a distant headline, and it leaves each person with a clearer sense of why the country continues to matter in their own life.

The writer is a Zionist educator at institutions around the world and recently published a new book, Zionism Today.