In 1913, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook led a delegation of ten rabbis on a month-long journey through the new Jewish farming villages of the Galilee and Samaria. Reports had reached Jaffa and Jerusalem of young Jews working the fields on Shabbat, of kitchens with no trace of kosher dietary laws being kept, of pioneers who had shed their observance somewhere between Odessa and the Jezreel Valley and felt no particular urge to pick it back up. The rabbis went to bridge the gap.
Despite the fact that they were not yet following the commandments, Rav Kook praised them. He looked at these secular farmers and saw the first movements of redemption. Plenty of his colleagues thought he had lost his judgment, and the question they pressed on him was a fair one. How can a land promised for holiness be handed to a people who are not behaving holy?
Moses answered this question in this week’s Torah portion, Eikev (Deuteronomy 7:12-11:25).
Moses has weeks to live. Israel is camped on the plains of Moab with the Jordan in front of them and forty years of wandering behind them. This is the last speech he will ever give, the final chance to send a nation into its inheritance with courage in its chest. But instead of pumping them up, Moses says the following:
Then he makes sure they understand what he means. He marches them back through the golden calf, built at the foot of the mountain while he stood on top of it receiving the tablets. He recites the roll call of their rebellions at Taberah, at Massah, at Kibroth-hattaavah. He reminds them of Kadesh Barnea, where they heard the report of the spies and refused to enter the Land at all. He reminds them that he smashed the tablets in front of their eyes.
What kind of leader spends his final hours cataloguing his people’s humiliations? These are not the men who sinned in the wilderness. That generation is buried behind them. Moses seems to be indicting the children for their fathers’ failures, on the morning of the greatest day in their history.
Why now?
The answer has nothing to do with humility, and Moses is not scolding anyone. Read the passage as a legal instrument rather than a rebuke and the whole thing snaps into focus. He is not lecturing this nation. He is drafting its deed of title.
Because if the Land is payment for righteousness, then the Land can be repossessed for unrighteousness. A prize awarded for good behavior is held on condition, and the condition can fail. Moses has watched this nation for four decades. He knows precisely what they are capable of at their best and at their worst, and he knows that sooner or later a generation will arise that deserves nothing at all. If their claim rests on their conduct, that generation loses everything.
So he takes merit out of the equation, and he does it three separate times in three verses, in language no one could later misread.
Moses names two reasons for what is about to happen, and Israel’s virtue is not one of them: the Canaanite nations lose the Land on their own account, and Israel enters it on Abraham’s. The transfer of the land to Israel rests on the oath sworn to the patriarchs rather than on anything the recipients have done to earn it.
Which is why the manner of that oath matters. In Genesis 15, God tells Abraham to cut the animals in half for the covenant ceremony, and then puts him to sleep. A smoking furnace and a flaming torch pass between the pieces alone, and God binds Himself while binding no one else, promising the Land to Abraham’s descendants. The promise was one-sided from the night it was made.
The last line of the passage is the one that sounds like an insult.
The stiff neck is not a warning tacked onto the end of a speech. It is the evidence Moses submits in support of his claim. You are getting this Land, but not because you deserve it.
Moses uses this argument again later in the same chapter, recounting his prayer after the golden calf. With God prepared to destroy the nation and start over, Moses does not defend their character. He says instead:
He argues from the covenant, over the heads of the people it covers.
A strong objection sits at the beginning of this very portion. Eikev opens with a condition. “And it shall come to pass, because you listen to these ordinances and keep them and do them, that the LORD your God shall keep with you the covenant and the mercy which He swore to your fathers” (Deuteronomy 7:12). Rain in its season, grain and wine and oil, herds and flocks and safety from every enemy, all of it hangs on obedience, and Moses will spend the rest of the portion saying so at length.
The two passages describe two different things. What Israel earns or forfeits by its conduct is the enjoyment of the Land: the harvest, the quiet border, the roof that does not shake. What Israel neither earns nor forfeits is the Land itself. Blessing runs on merit. Title runs on Abraham. Once that line comes into view, the harshest verses in the Torah stop threatening the Jewish claim to Israel and start confirming it.
None of this excuses anything. Scripture judges Israel more harshly than any nation on earth, and Moses promises exile and ruin for covenant faithlessness in the chapters on either side of this one. Exile is a punishment, though, not a repeal. The tenant can be removed from the property. The deed does not change hands.
Then the harder question. If exile is the punishment for faithlessness, why does the exile end for a generation of farmers who kept almost nothing? Ezekiel answered that before it happened. “Not for your sake do I act, O house of Israel, but for My holy name, which you have profaned among the nations” (Ezekiel 36:22). Two verses later God gathers them out of the countries and brings them into their own land, and only afterward sprinkles clean water on them and puts a new heart within them. The return comes first and the repair comes second. Moses ruled out merit at the entrance, and Ezekiel ruled it out at the return.
Replacement theology has taught for most of the last two thousand years that the Jewish people sinned their way out of God’s promises, that the covenant passed to a worthier heir, and that the physical land of Israel was exchanged for something spiritual and safely metaphorical. The argument carries a certain logic, and it has a fatal flaw. Moses closed the door on it before Israel had crossed the Jordan. What was never granted for worthiness cannot be forfeited for unworthiness. The promise does not run on Jewish merit, and so Jewish failure cannot bring it down.
For most of those two thousand years, the forfeiture argument had a powerful exhibit standing behind it. The Jews were scattered through other people’s countries, the Land lay in other people’s hands, and its ruin was visible to any traveler who cared to look. Whatever Moses had said on the plains of Moab, history appeared to have overruled him. That exhibit is gone. The Jewish people are back in the Land, farming it and defending it and burying their dead in it.
The farmers Rav Kook visited in 1913 did not deserve the Land of Israel, and he never claimed they did. Neither did the generation that walked in behind Joshua. God gave it to them anyway, because He swore to Abraham that He would, and He has never needed our merit in order to keep His word.
That is not the weak point in the Jewish claim to Israel. It is the whole strength of it.
