Milk and Honey

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, September 9, 2006

There’s an old joke about prisoners who have been together for so long, that they have already heard all of each other’s stories and jokes. Instead of retelling their stories, all they do is recite a number, and everyone laughs as if the joke had been told. A new prisoner comes in and watches this process. One of the old guys says 42 and everyone laughs uproariously. Another guy says 30 and the same thing happens. He decides to give it a try. 64 he calls out- and total silence. He looks curiously at his bunk mate who explains, its all in how you tell it.

There are certain words in the Bible that are so familiar that when we hear them, our mind fills in the rest of the story. One such phrase is “a land flowing with milk and honey”,IT is a phrase repeated many times in the books of Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy and found also in the prophetic writings especially of Jeremiah. As I was practicing with Amy and Diane several weeks ago, I noticed that this phrase was also repeated in both Diane and Amy’s section of the Torah reading- eretz zavat chalav u’dvash.

These words convey the image of a lush and fertile land, a land of profound blessing. In a longer description of the Promised Land, also found in Deuteronomy (Chapter 8) we find:

7 For the Eternal your God is bringing you into a good land of flowing streams and pools of HYPERLINK "http://www.allaboutgod.com/truth-topics/water.htm" water, with springs that gush forth in the valleys and hills.

8 It is a land of HYPERLINK "http://www.allaboutgod.com/truth-topics/wheat.htm" wheat and barley, of grapevines, fig trees, pomegranates, olives, and honey.

9 It is a land where food is plentiful and nothing is lacking. It is a land where iron is as common as stone, and HYPERLINK "http://www.allaboutgod.com/truth-topics/copper.htm" copper is abundant in the hills.

As wonderful as the land of Israel is, this sounds to me like an idealization, a very powerful idealization that has remained in our minds as a picture of the promised land for generations.

Having an idealized picture of Israel was natural for the generation of the desert wanderings. Israel, the promised land, held everything they were not experiencing in their nomadic wanderings, and everything they suspected others were enjoying while they were not. It was the dream that helped them continue on their journey in the face of many obstacles and which held them together as a people.

Many of us have idealized pictures of Israel, but today there are times when these are helpful and times when that it is less true.

I remember when I was a teenager and active in the Labor Zionist movement Habonim. One of the most common topics of our discussions was the gap between the picture of Israel as a utopian pioneering society, where everyone worked communally all day and then danced the hora at night, versus the reality of Israel in the late 60’s and early 70’s. By that time Israel was already an urban society. It was struggling, not only with issues with the Arab population in the newly acquired territories, but also with a tremendous social gap between Israel’s Ashkenazi and Mizrachi citizens. When some young people arrived in Israel and discovered these social problems, these warts on the pretty picture of the promised land, they became very disenchanted, and felt that everything they had been told was propoganda.

I know every today people maintain idealized pictures of Israel, perhaps as a place where everyone is religious, or as a place where everyone is motivated by Zionist passion and sometimes can be disappointed to discover that many Israelis are more attuned to their day to day lives than to the joy of being in the holy land or to the questions of world Jewry. In a similar way we often want Israel to be perfect in everything the country does, holding Israel to a standard that is higher than that to which we hold the United States or any other country. Developing a realistic picture of the country, with its inner conflicts and its very significant external challenges is more helpful than maintaining a rosy tinged illusion. Israel like any of us, will sometimes miss the mark, and in some circumstances will struggle to choose the lesser of two evils. We need to accept that Israel will have imperfections without rejecting Israel because of these accommodations with difficult realities.

Personally, I am not totally willing to let go of the idealized picture of the promised land, a land of bounty and security, equality and peace, because I believe it remains helpful to hold up this picture of what could be, even if it is not yet what really exists. This positive dream of what a Jewish homeland could be, this picture of Yerushalayim Shel Maalah, of the heavenly Jerusalem, helps motivate us to maintain our strong connection with Israeli society. Holding on to this dream and continuing to work for it, also strengthens us so that no matter what the difficulties that Israel faces in the present, we remain one people.