During our nearly two-thousand-years from the Land of Israel, many concepts of Torah became distorted and unclear. For example, one claim which I have heard from many Diaspora Jews is that the Torah was given on Mount Sinai, outside of Eretz Yisrael, to show that the Torah can be practiced everywhere. This statement disregards the teaching of Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi in “The Kuzari" that Mount Sinai is in fact within the Torah boundaries of the Land of Israel. But let’s say that it isn’t. The very opening of the Torah portion of Devarim will bury this Diaspora misconception.
Every year come Parshat Devarim at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva in Jerusalem, the Rosh Yeshiva, HaRav Tzvi Yehuda HaKohen Kook, of blessed memory, would tell his students to get ready to hear the Torah explained by the greatest Torah teacher of them all - Moshe Rabeinu.
As we begin his review of the Torah, Moshe goes over the teachings of the Torah as the Israelite Nation stands poised to enter the Promised Land. The Spies and their rebellious generation had all died in punishment for not wanting to make aliyah, but the pernicious influence of their tragic misunderstanding still remained. So at the very beginning of the Book of Devarim, Moshe begins to explain the Torah, as it says, “Moshe began to explain the Torah…." (Devarim, 1:6).
Rashi comments that Moshe explained the Torah in 70 languages. Apparently, he prophetically knew that the Jews would one day be scattered around the world, where they would speak French and Spanish and German and Russian and English and Yiddish, and Moshe didn’t want them to have the excuse, “We didn’t know we were supposed to live in Israel - we don’t speak Hebrew, so how can you blame us for not complying with the Torah?" So Moshe made sure to teach the Torah in 70 languages, so that every Jew would know.
HaRav Tzvi Yehuda would ask his gathered students in the large Beit Midrash of the yeshiva: “What is the very first thing Moshe teaches the Nation, who are all waiting to hear the explanation of the Torah from Moshe himself?
“‘Moshe began to explain the Torah, saying, the Lord our God spoke to us in Horev, saying, You have dwelt long enough in this mountain - TURN AND TAKE UP YOUR JOURNEY - go to the Land of Israel! BEHOLD, I HAVE SET THE LAND BEFORE YOU, GO IN AND POSSESS THE LAND THAT THE LORD SWORE TO YOUR FATHERS, AVRAHAM, YITZHAK, AND YAACOV TO GIVE THEM, AND TO THEIR SEED AFTER THEM" (Devarim, 1:6-8).
“Is there something unclear about this statement?" HaRav Tzvi Yehuda would ask. “Not at all. There is absolutely no room for mistake. The Torah wasn’t given to be kept in the wilderness, nor in Russia or America. The Torah isn’t a ‘religion’ like Buddhism or Christianity, God forbid. The Torah isn’t some abstract spirituality floating like a cloud in the sky. The Torah has an EARTHLY BASE. Not Sinai. Not Europe. Not the United States. The Torah is the DIVINE CONSTITUTION of the NATION OF ISRAEL, and every NATION needs its own LAND. And the holy CHILDREN OF ISRAEL have their own unique HOLY LAND."
What is the first and fundamental message that Moshe explains when he teaches the Torah to Am Yisrael? Not Shabbos. Not kashrus. “Do you want to know what Torah is?" Moshe asks them. “If you really want to keep it? GO IN AND POSSESS THE LAND! That’s the basis of Torah. Only in the Holy Land will you be able to understand what the Torah is all about, and only there can all of the Torah be kept."
This is the teaching which Moshe wanted to sink into our hearts in order to uproot the tragic error of the Spies. We are to be our own HOLY NATION with our own HOLY LAND, and not live as a minority in someone else’s country performing a small handful of religious precepts. That may be the “Judaism" of the exile, but it isn’t real Torah.
HaRav Tzvi Yehuda taught that If a Jew is thrown into prison in Russia and he doesn’t have tefillin, then he can’t perform the mitzvah of putting on tefillin. But the mitzvah of tefillin isn’t cancelled because of this. The very first morning that he gets out of jail, he once again must perform the mitzvah of putting on tefillin.
Similarly, he taught that this situation resembled what happened many times in Jewish villages in Russia, when the Jews couldn’t obtain etrogs on Sukkot. Without the etrogs, they couldn’t perform the commandment of waving the lulav, but this did not cancel the mitzvah. The mitzvah remained. Come the following Sukkot, if the Jews had etrogs in Russia, they continued performing the mitzvah just as before.
So too with the mitzvah of living in the Land of Israel. If we are physically prevented from doing so because we lack the financial, economic, and military means necessary to establish Jewish sovereignty over Eretz Yisrael, then the Torah commandment is not in our grasp. However, living in Eretz Yisrael, and putting it under Jewish control, remains a mitzvah, and the minute the capability returns to our hands, the Jewish People are beholden to do so.
In the past century, the Almighty gave us the capability of returning to our homeland. Disguising His guiding hand behind a curtain of seemingly natural, historical events like World Wars and international declarations and agreements, and through people like Herzl, Balfour, Jabotinsky, Rabbi Kook, and Ben Gurion, and through an awakened Jewish spirit that led to the fighting forces of the Jewish Brigade, the Hagana, Etzel, Lechi, and Tzahal, the State of Israel was reborn.
Metaphorically, the etrog and tefillin returned to our hands. The mitzvah to live in the Land of Israel became reactivated for all the nation. HaRav Tzvi Yehuda happily noted that indeed a few million Jews have come home. But he mourned the fact that many others still wallow in foreign lands, even though the gates of the prison have opened.