Yom Ha’Atzmaut / Parshas Tazria-Metzora 5785
When I imagine a utopian Israel, the landscape is dotted with shuls and yeshivos, restaurants all serving up food under the strictest hashgacha, and sefarim stores perpetually having trouble keeping their inventory up with the demand. And I’m talking about Tel Aviv. No immodest advertisements, no heads absent sizeable yarmulkas, no posters proudly announcing certain establishments as “Open on Shabbos.”
Theodore Herzl, along with the rest of the early secular Zionists responsible for founding the State of Israel, had a very different idea. Herzl’s vision was for a Jewish State not specifically connected to Torah, to the very thing that makes Jews Jews. Israel would be an epicenter of cultural, artistic, and academic expression of the Jewish People, but not anchored in anything inherently Jewish, other than the minds of those who would produce it. It was to be Vienna if all Viennese were Jews.
And yet his vision has brought Israel far closer to mine than he could possibly have imagined. Indeed, the sort of scene I’ve described takes place every day in cities and neighborhoods throughout the country, if not necessarily in Tel Aviv. How did this come to pass? Herzl’s movement. The passion and energy, the money and muscle, the political contacts and business know-how that those early Zionists poured into the land is what ultimately paved the roads, laid the pipes, and flipped the switches necessary to accommodate and support a massive population of Jews, including devoutly Orthodox ones, as well as the institutions and infrastructure they’d need to live richly religious lives.
And there is something deeply unsettling about that. Could it be that something so holy could originate in something so profane? Could the vision of a Herzl actually develop into true, bona fide geulah?
Rabbi Yaakov Moshe Charlop was the first Rosh Yeshiva of Mercaz HaRav, the yeshiva founded by Rav Avraham Yitzchak Hakohen Kook. An ardent follower of Rav Kook’s thought, Rabbi Charlop was of the belief that what the Jewish People were witnessing in the decades leading up to the eventual establishment of the Jewish State was the stirrings of the redemption. Yet, how could it be so given the involvement of so many so far from Torah Judaism?
Rabbi Charlop pointed to the beginning of this week’s Parsha, Parshas Tazria. No sooner does the Torah introduce the miraculous event of childbirth than it splashes cold water on the proceedings. No poetic language about the beauty of the mother and father being united in the production of a child, nothing about the partnership they enjoy with Hashem in creating a new soul, nothing of the value of bringing about a next generation of the Jewish People.
No, just that the mother is now temeiah, is now rendered impure as a result of the child she gave birth to.
This, explained Rabbi Charlop, is a reality that the Torah insists we acknowledge. Yes, bringing a new baby into the world is an act of unprecedented holiness. And it may well be that the new infant now laying in his mother’s arms will grow up to be the next Gadol HaDor or even Mashiach himself. Yet the process is not without its tumah. The mother becomes impure.
Even when there is a storybook ending, there is not always a storybook beginning. Important, holy, even redemptive processes can wade through impurity before arriving at their holy destination. One cannot make assumptions about where something will land based on the impure location from which it was launched.
If you travel around Israel today, it is hard not to see signs of redemption. The Land itself is enjoying a renaissance unknown for thousands of years, with farms and cities sprouting forth in areas never thought inhabitable. Strictly kosher food is plentiful, expressions of faith in Hashem abound, and the din of Torah and tefilah echoes throughout the land.
Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Land has both physically and spiritually come back to life. How does that square with the impure motives from which so much of that life began? Quite well, actually. Just as a mother bringing a new child into the world, a trace of impurity does not tell the whole story of the miracle that’s been created.