The question haunts every discussion about the Middle East: “Why can’t the Jews just live peacefully among the nations like everyone else? Why this obsession with a tiny strip of land on the Mediterranean?” For over two millennia, the world has watched Jews maintain an inexplicable connection to Israel. Jews who have never set foot in the land still face Jerusalem in prayer three times daily. Jews who speak no Hebrew still conclude their Passover meals with “Next year in Jerusalem.” Jews living comfortably in America, Europe, and elsewhere still mourn the destruction of a Temple that fell nearly two thousand years ago. Even as Jewish communities thrived in Babylon, Spain, Poland, and across the diaspora, this connection to one specific piece of Middle Eastern real estate never wavered.
Christianity spread across continents without requiring a Christian state. Islam conquered vast territories without needing a single Muslim homeland. Buddhism and Hinduism flourish in multiple nations without demanding exclusive sovereignty. Yet Judaism, perhaps the smallest of the world’s major faiths, insists that its very survival depends on one specific piece of real estate no larger than New Jersey.
What makes the Jewish relationship with the Land of Israel so fundamentally different from every other religion’s relationship with geography?
The answer lies in a single phrase that appears in the very first message God commanded Moses to deliver to Pharaoh. When the Almighty instructed Moses to demand the release of the Israelites from Egyptian bondage, He didn’t call them “My people” or “My nation” or “My chosen ones.” Instead, He said something far more specific and startling:
Beni bechori Yisrael, Israel is My first-born son. Not “sons” plural, but “son” singular. The Hebrew is unmistakable in its grammatical precision. God didn’t call the Jewish people His children. He called them His child.
This isn’t metaphorical language or religious symbolism. The Sages understood this verse as the foundational principle of Jewish existence: the Jewish nation isn’t a collection of individuals who happen to share religious beliefs or ethnic origins. We are a single human life, one unified being that spans continents and centuries, one soul inhabiting multiple bodies across time and space.
When the Bible describes the Israelites encamped at Mount Sinai, it uses peculiar language that every Hebrew student notices immediately: “Vayichan sham Yisrael neged hahar” – “And Israel encamped there opposite the mountain” (Exodus 19:2). The verb, āencamped,ā is singular, not plural. Six hundred thousand men plus their families, yet the Torah describes them as one person camping, not many people camping. As the medieval biblical commentator Rashi explains, the people stood at Sinai “as one person, with one heart.”
This unity wasn’t a temporary enthusiasm that arose before receiving the Torah. It wasn’t crowd psychology or nationalist fervor. It was the fundamental nature of Jewish existence made visible. For one shining moment at Sinai, the people of Israel functioned as they were designed to function: as a single human being in perfect unity with the Divine will.
But here lies the crucial point that the world misses when it asks why Jews can’t simply live peacefully dispersed among the nations. A human being isn’t just a soul floating in spiritual space. Every human being has both a soul and a body, and the soul needs its body to function in the physical world. Without a body, a soul cannot eat, work, build, create, or express its inner essence in tangible reality.
If the Jewish nation is a single human life, then like every human life, it must have both a unified soul and a unified body. The soul of Israel is that mystical unity that connects Jews across time and geographyāthe shared destiny that sent thousands of Jews rushing toward Israel, not away from it, in the days after October 7th. But where is the body?
The body of Israel is the Land of Israel itself.
The Land isn’t just where Jews happen to live. It’s the physical form through which the people of Israelās soul expresses itself in the material world. Every nation needs territory to survive, but the Jewish nation needs its specific territory to exist. Without the Land of Israel, the people of Israel become a disembodied soul, cut off from the physical realm where human life actually happens.
This explains why Jewish law contains hundreds of commandments that can only be fulfilled in the Land of Israel. It explains why the Temple service required offerings from the produce of this particular soil. It explains why the Bible speaks constantly of the Land’s unique holiness, its supernatural responsiveness to Jewish moral behavior, and its role as the stage where the Divine presence meets human history.
The Land of Israel isn’t holy because Jews live there. Jews live there because it’s holy, because it’s the designated body for the soul of Israel. Just as your individual soul needs your individual body to function in this world, the collective soul of the Jewish nation needs its collective body, the Land of Israel, to fulfill its purpose in God’s plan for history.
When the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 CE and the Jews were scattered into exile, something unprecedented happened in human history. A nation’s soul was separated from its body, yet somehow both survived. For nearly two thousand years, the Jewish people have lived in a condition that should be impossible: as a disembodied soul maintaining its identity and mission while separated from its natural physical home.
The great medieval philosopher Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, author of the Kuzari, described the Jewish people in exile as a terminally ill patient whom all the doctors have given up for dead, yet who refuses to die. Against all medical logic, against all historical precedent, the patient keeps breathing, keeps hoping, keeps believing in an impossible recovery.
That recovery began in our generation. After seventy-five years of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, we are witnessing the reunion of the Jewish soul with its body. The process is incomplete, sometimes painful, always contested by those who prefer Jews to remain a disembodied spiritual abstraction rather than a living nation in its natural home.
But the reunion is undeniable and divinely ordained. The Jewish nation is returning to its full human form: one people, one land, one destiny under one God. This isn’t merely a political development or a response to persecution. It’s the restoration of the natural order, the healing of an ancient wound, the resurrection of dried bones prophesied by Ezekiel coming to pass before our eyes.
The world asks why Jews can’t live like everyone else. The answer is simple: because Jews aren’t like everyone else. We are not many individuals sharing a religion. We are one human life, created by God to know and serve Him through the Torah, designed to function as a complete being only when our soul and body are reunited in the Land He gave us as our eternal inheritance.
