{"id":5089,"date":"2018-10-15T09:01:39","date_gmt":"2018-10-15T07:01:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moked.it\/international\/?p=5089"},"modified":"2019-05-28T17:36:54","modified_gmt":"2019-05-28T15:36:54","slug":"grasping-onto-land-sarah-cave-mahpela","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moked.it\/international\/2018\/10\/15\/grasping-onto-land-sarah-cave-mahpela\/","title":{"rendered":"Grasping onto the Land \u2013 Sarah and the Cave of Mahpela"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"mascetti\"<\/a>By Yaakov Mascetti*<\/strong><\/p>\n

When it comes to the weekly Torah portion of Haye Sarah, it is arduous for me to ignore the growing rhetorical emphasis placed on the topic of the Cave of Mahpelah and its role as the first acquisition of land made by a Jew in the Promised Land of Canaan. In Genesis 15: 7-21, God, as we know, promises the land to Abraham. The text reads as follows:<\/p>\n


\nThen He said to him, \u201cI am the LORD who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to assign this land to you as a possession.\u201d And he said, \u201cO Lord GOD, how shall I know that I am to possess it?\u201d He answered, \u201cBring Me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old she-goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtledove, and a young bird.\u201d He brought Him all these and cut them in two, placing each half opposite the other; but he did not cut up the bird. Birds of prey came down upon the carcasses, and Abram drove them away. As the sun was about to set, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a great dark dread descended upon him. And He said to Abram, \u201cKnow well that your offspring shall be strangers in a land not theirs, and they shall be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years; but I will execute judgment on the nation they shall serve, and in the end they shall go free with great wealth. As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; You shall be buried at a ripe old age. And they shall return here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.\u201d When the sun set and it was very dark, there appeared a smoking oven, and a flaming torch which passed between those pieces. On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, \u201cTo your offspring I assign this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates: the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.\u201d
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

The pact between Abraham and God creates, so to speak, a difficulty, namely the dissociation between the present in which is it formulated, and a future moment in which the descendants of this man from Ur would inherit their land \u2013 this split between the present and the future, between the state of facts characterizing the land and a distant point in time in which this state of affairs will have changed into something completely different, still causes problems. The modern reader approaching the story of the death and burial of Sarah must, in my opinion, maintain a necessary detachment from the text and the reality it describes. This is not a story of acquisition, nor is this the narration of an undeniable Jewish property of the Land of Israel \u2013 this is a story of Divine promises, of their interpretation and of their realization. <\/p>\n

God\u2019s promise is, for starters, undeniable: <\/p>\n


\n(Gen. 17: 5-8) – \u201cAs for Me, this is My covenant with you: You shall be the father of a multitude of nations. And you shall no longer be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I make you the father of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fertile, and make nations of you; and kings shall come forth from you. I will maintain My covenant between Me and you, and your offspring to come, as an everlasting covenant throughout the ages, to be God to you and to your offspring to come. I assign the land you sojourn in to you and your offspring to come, all the land of Canaan, as an everlasting holding <\/strong>. I will be their God.\u201d
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

An everlasting holding \u2013 hard to misinterpret that right? Well, actually that is what I wish to do \u2013 deconstruct the concept of a human being holding onto the land, grasping onto it, and claiming property over it. When Abraham approaches the Hittites in order to bury Sarah, he chooses the following words: <\/p>\n


\n(Gen. 23: 3-4) – Then Abraham rose from beside his dead, and spoke to the Hittites, saying, \u201cI am a resident alien among you; sell me a burial site among you, that I may remove my dead for burial.\u201d
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Rashi interprets these two verses and the encounter between these two sides quoting the Midrash: <\/p>\n


\nI AM A STRANGER AND A SETTLER WITH YOU \u2014 A stranger having come from another land, but I have settled down amongst you. A Midrashic explanation is: if you agree to sell me the land then I will regard myself as a stranger and will pay for it, but if not, I shall claim it as a settler and will take it as my legal right, because the Holy One, blessed be He, said to me, (12:7) \u201cUnto thy seed I give this land” (Genesis Rabbah 58:6).
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Rashi thus appears to interpret Abraham\u2019s approach as one that both takes into consideration the context and <\/em>the Divine Promise \u2013 first he presents himself as a stranger in a stranger\u2019s land, one who does not own and cannot own the land and thus is willing to pay for it. Yet, if the other side fails to acknowledge his right to buy a piece of land in order to bury his dead wife, then Abraham is, in Rashi\u2019s midrashic interpretation, willing to use the Divine promise as a viable option. Both the Land and its owners have therefore two statuses at the same time \u2013 Abraham can be a stranger and a Divinely ordained owner, just as the land can be Hittite and must therefore be bought, or it can be already inherently Jewish and may thus be taken by legal right. The latter is, as we know, the sole interest of those who read this portion with a political set of priorities. It is my belief that Abraham\u2019s openness to an acquisition of the land from the Hittites points to his intention to bring together two statuses \u2013 that of an alien and that of an owner, and thus to redefine entirely the concept of \u201cgrasping onto the land.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his commentary to the Torah, Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch interprets this passage focusing a lexical nuances which have, as I will show, important consequence for the subject discussed in this article: <\/p>\n


\n\u201cburial site\u201d \u2013 whoever interprets the Hebrew word \u201cahuzah\u201d as pointing to a process of acquisition, in the sense of an object bought and held in the hands of its owner, makes a grave mistake. The word \u201cahuzah\u201d points to a site, a piece of land which, as such, cannot be owned or held in the hands of any one person \u2013 \u201cahuzah\u201d never means in the Torah \u201can object which can be carried or passed on from one person to another. Furthermore, the verb \u201cto grasp\u201d is always used in the Torah in its passive form\u2026 pointing to the fact that it is not the object that is owned and held by the individual, but rather that the opposite is true \u2013 the owner is owned by the land.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Abraham, to use Rav Hirsch\u2019s words and carrying them a step further, is not approaching the Hittites in order to buy a piece of land and thus to acquire eternal legal rights (which he already has by virtue of God\u2019s promise) to the Land of Israel \u2013 what he is doing is looking for a place to bury his dead wife, a process in which the etymology indicated by Hirsch applies perfectly. Upon being buried, the individual does not own the land, but rather is owned by it. Rav Hirsch then continues his reasoning with the following words: <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The land takes in its owner, and the latter is held in by it. For this reason\u2026 one cannot swear upon one\u2019s land, for upon swearing one binds one\u2019s possessions and all that is transient in his life, to the oath taken \u2013 and if that which is uttered turns out to be false, all those possessions are taken from him. \u201cAhuzah\u201d in this context must mean, therefore, the beginning of a settlement, an operation through which the individual grasps onto a piece of land. There is a connection between Abraham\u2019s need to bury his dead wife and his need to buy a piece of land \u2013 he lived for years on Hittite land with all his possessions and his people, and never requested to buy a spot \u2013 for up until Sarah\u2019s death, Abraham\u2019s identity was that of a wanderer. His need to bury his wife forced him to acquire a piece of land for the first time. A burial was therefore his first connection to the land, the first binding to a soil which limits him and ties him to itself \u2013 \u201cahuzah.\u201d
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Hirsch makes a very interesting point \u2013 the individual cannot, in his etymological analysis of this passage, own the land, nor can he make an oath upon it. From this perspective, a human being is the transient entity, while the land is the fixed point \u2013 Abraham is a wanderer who has no interest in acquiring a fixed point of connection with the Land he has been promised. Abraham is the one who will multiply into a multitude of peoples, who contemplates an infinity of stars and who will keep wandering \u2013 yet from this moment on, he is bound to this piece of land in particular, not because of his need to settle it or build a site where his new culture will thrive, but because of a grave. This act of grasping onto the land is founded, so to speak, on a void of presence. <\/p>\n

So what is the Divine promise saying to Abraham and how are we to understand this weekly portion, if not in a politically oriented interpretational key? The Midrash Rabbah may point us in an alternative direction, one in which there is a fragile, as opposed to eternal and legal, connection between the Land of Israel and the People of Israel \u2013 the Midrash, in fact, presents this everlasting holding onto the Promised Land as nothing less than a conditional bond which God defines as depending on the Israelites\u2019 behavior: <\/p>\n


\nGen. 17:8 reads – \u201cI assign the land you sojourn in to you and your offspring to come, all the land of Canaan, as an everlasting holding. I will be their God.\u201d Rabbi Yudan said: [God thus said to Abraham:] If your sons accept my Divine authority over themselves, I will be their God and patron \u2013 if they won\u2019t, then I won\u2019t be their God and patron. If your sons will enter the Land, they will accept my Divine authority \u2013 if they will not enter it, they will not accept my Divinity. If they will circumcise their male children, they will enter the Land, and if they won\u2019t circumcise them, they won\u2019t enter the Land. If your sons will accept to keep the Sabbath, they will receive the Land \u2013 if not, they will not receive it.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

In this sense, the same person, the same Abraham, can be both a stranger and a land-owner, both a wanderer and one who is bound to a specific place. The same individual, in this way, can both accept Divine authority and live in the Land promised to him, or, on the other hand, he can refuse that authority and return to a rootless state of wandering. In any one of these cases, human beings are the ones grasped by the land, and not the other way around \u2013 the land is said to devour its inhabitants, and the land is the fixed point around which the senseless transient nature of men rotates chaotically. And the land, the land promised by God, is a land which cannot, will not comply with the crass and aggressive urge for control of some human beings.
\n
\n*Yaakov Mascetti holds a Ph.D. and teaches at the Department of Comparative Literature, Bar Ilan University.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Yaakov Mascetti* When it comes to the weekly Torah portion of Haye Sarah, it is arduous for me to ignore the growing rhetorical emphasis placed on the topic of the Cave of Mahpelah and its role as the first acquisition of land made by a Jew in the Promised Land of Canaan. In Genesis… leggi <\/i><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4296,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7610],"tags":[],"position":[],"class_list":["post-5089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pilpulopinion"],"yoast_head":"\nGrasping onto the Land \u2013 Sarah and the Cave of Mahpela - Pagine Ebraiche International<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/moked.it\/international\/2018\/10\/15\/grasping-onto-land-sarah-cave-mahpela\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Grasping onto the Land \u2013 Sarah and the Cave of Mahpela - Pagine Ebraiche International\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By Yaakov Mascetti* When it comes to the weekly Torah portion of Haye Sarah, it is arduous for me to ignore the growing rhetorical emphasis placed on the topic of the Cave of Mahpelah and its role as the first acquisition of land made by a Jew in the Promised Land of Canaan. 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