The Body of Israel is Burning - Do We Care?
Images and reflections from the historic landscapes lost to last week’s wildfires.
Dear Healthy Jew,
I was planning on sending you today a deep-and-meaningful-insight type of post about what’s new at Healthy Jew.
But these terrible wildfires have gotten me thinking and feeling about the areas of Israel’s natural world that are burning, areas where some of our nation’s most momentous miracles happened, both millennia ago and just last century.
You see, it’s not enough to care about the people and property in danger, although, of course those must be our first concerns. The land itself is important, because it’s the body of the Jewish people, as I explain in my book, Land of Health: Israel’s War for Wellness. Israel’s health is our health.
Israel, as the Torah reports, is a beautiful land of abundance of flowing springs and thriving wildlife, “flowing with milk and honey.” But today, our stunning landscapes are turning into smoldering ashes. Millions of plants and animals, big and small, are being burnt to death every hour.
Even after the fires are finally extinguished, the smoky ruins will make it much harder to connect to our living heritage here. It will be decades until the edible and medicinal plants - the plants whose ancestors were eaten here by our ancestors - will again dominate the countryside.
Let’s walk together through the land that’s burning - before the fires began.
Just over a month ago, I hiked with this special group of Lev Hatorah students in some of the areas that are now scorched:
We marched up to the orchards and Crusader fortress of Latrun where in 1948 the nascent IDF tried and failed 3 times to open the road to besieged Jerusalem:
We walked on the Burma Road that miraculously - and with incredible tenacity and ingenuity - bypassed the blocked Route 1 to save the capital:
We crossed the Ayalon Valley, where the sun stopped for Joshua almost 3,300 years ago:
When the guys got hot and tired, after I bothered them for being cranky old men, we rested inside this old Crusader fort, overlooking everything that’s burning now:
Then the Houthis sent a ballistic missile at us. Not much to do but hope the Crusaders built to last:
This is what’s burning.
Do we care?
We must care, because, as I explain in my book, the Land of Israel offers a path to God from inside the shortcomings of our material lives. Even when we get it all wrong, God wants to hold us close in the perfect place for imperfect people - if we want to find Him here. So our relationship with the Land’s life is our relationship with God while in our earthly existence.
We don’t dwell in the realm of the spirit, knowing God in the abstract language of the mind. Instead, we’re often mired in desires and distractions, our hearts torn between sincere wishes to do better and the reality of our failures. Wherever we find ourselves today - in Israel or abroad - the centerpiece of our Judaism must be yearning for the Land where we can find heaven on earth.
What’s the good news?
Israel will heal. Rebirth will follow death, perhaps sooner and in different ways than we can imagine.
How do I know? Because even as the fires rages a dozen miles away, three local Ramat Bet Shemesh families joined me today in Israel’s natural world to taste the plants whose ancestors were eaten here by our ancestors.
On modern Israel’s Independence Day, as we walked my favorite foraging route, we saw how the seasons continue to shift: the wild carrots were harder to pull up, but the nettle and mustard seeds are just now perfectly ripe, and the cactus flowers are blooming.
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Be well,
Rabbi Shmuel Chaim Naiman
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Arsonists. But we survive it all. Thank you, Hashem.
Very sad…. And all too common in Australia, where I live most of the time.
Apparently, though, in the long term, at least in this country, fire is necessary from time to time to keep the cycle of growth-regrowth happening