The love of the Jewish people for the land of Israel is a mad love. Day in day out, month after month, year after year, we fight and bleed and die for the right to live in this little strip of land along the Mediterranean between Syria and Egypt. It’s not a normal connection of a nation to its motherland. As God makes clear in the Bible, this relationship transcends the typical bonds that tie a people to their territory. Israelās connection to the land runs deeper than politics, deeper than nationalism, deeper even than survival itself.
Yet a careful reading of Scripture reveals an intriguing puzzle that goes to the heart of this relationship. At the beginning of the Exodus, we were explicitly promised:
This verse makes it crystal clearāthe land is an ancestral inheritance, passed down through the generations from our forefathers. But later in Exodus, we encounter something different:
Why would Scripture use two completely different terms to describe our relationship to the same piece of land? Is the land of Israel a gift or an inheritance – and what difference does that make?
Picture an elderly man, broken by poverty, barely surviving from day to day. Tell him that a great inheritance awaits him, and watch his face transform. The promise gives him strength to endure today’s hunger because he knows tomorrow holds abundance. But take a young person just starting out in life and promise him the same inheritance, and you might destroy him. Why work hard? Why develop character? Why push through difficulty when money will simply fall into his lap?
The Sages teach that God speaks to His people the same way a wise father speaks to his childrenādifferently, depending on what they need to hear.
In Good Times: The Land as Gift
After the Exodus from Egypt, as the Israelites prepared to enter the land as free people, God’s message shifted to the language of gift. This wasn’t accidental. A free people walking into their homeland needed to understand something crucial: this land comes with conditions. “And He gave them the lands of nations, and they inherited the labor of peoplesāthat they might observe His statutes and keep His laws” (Psalms 105:44-45).
A gift demands gratitude. A gift can be withdrawn. When we walk freely in our land, when our enemies are quiet and our borders are secure, we must remember that Israel is a gift from God, not something we deserve simply because our ancestors lived here. We hold it through divine grace and our obedience to His ways. The moment we take it for grantedāthe moment we assume we deserve the land simply by virtue of our bloodlineāwe risk losing the spiritual foundation that truly entitles us to it.
This is why the second promise speaks of the land being “given” to us. During times of freedom and strength, we must not take the land for granted. We must be worthy of Godās gift.
In Dark Times: The Land as Inheritance
But during the crushing bondage in Egypt, under the brutal whips of Pharaoh’s taskmasters, the Israelites needed a different message entirely. In their darkest hour, they needed to know that no matter how hopeless their situation appeared, they possessed an unshakeable right to the land of their fathers. This is why the first promise declares: “And I will give it to you as an inheritance.”
An inheritance cannot be taken away by any earthly power. Even when scattered in exile across the nations, our connection to the land remains unbroken because it flows from an eternal covenant, not from human treaties or political arrangements.
Rabbi Yaakov Moshe Charlap explains the distinction: In a sale or gift, once the transaction is complete, the seller or giver no longer maintains a connection to the object. But with an inheritance, the presence of the one who bequeaths it remains forever embedded within it. This is why in the Land of Israel, we always feel the presence of the One who gave itāGod Himself. He gave us the land as an inheritance and gave us Himself along with the land.
When we realize that God dwells with us in the land during these painful times, we draw tremendous strength. He gave us the land as an inheritance, and gave us Himself along with the land.
This understanding transforms how we view the land of Israel in our own time. The land is simultaneously our inheritance and God’s gift. As an inheritance, it cannot be taken from us by any human decree. As a gift, it demands our continued spiritual worthiness and connection to the Divine.
Today, as Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran dedicate themselves to wiping us off the land, and as self-righteous nations like England, France and Canada threaten Israel and demand that we surrender Judea and Samaria to create yet another Arab terror state, we must remember: Israel is our inheritance. It belongs to us as God promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. No mortal powerāno matter how mighty, no matter how numerousācan ever nullify our right to this land. The deed was signed in Heaven long before the first human empire rose and fell. Our claim predates every other nation’s existence, and it will outlast them all.
