The Torah and the Land |
Parshat Bamidbar always precedes the holiday of Shavuot. Rabbi Sacks points out that the Torah was given in the desert, before we conquered Eretz Yisrael and made it our homeland. This is highly atypical. In the United States, the Founding Fathers did not write a Constitution while they were elsewhere and then build a country in which it could become the basis for their laws. The British did not draft the Magna Carta and then build a constitutional monarchy. No. They found the land, they built a civilization, established a culture, and then they adopted governing instruments for their society.
Israel is different. First we got the Torah. The blueprint preceded the construction. The Torah guides our lives whether or not we are privileged to be in our land. Indeed, for the greater part of recent Jewish history, we were deprived of a homeland. Yet we survived, because we have the Torah, which provides a focus whether we are home or in galut. This is why the Torah had to have........