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In Parsha Matos, Sh’vatim Gad and Reuven approached Moshe Rabbeinu regarding their desire to graze their flocks and settle their families on the East side of the Yarden. To this, Moshe Rabbeinu replied, “Shall your brothers go off to war, and shall you sit here?” (Sefer Bamidbar, Perek 32, posuk 6)
Moshe was quite angry at the two Sh’vatim. He was concerned lest Gad and Reuven would avoid taking part in the wars for Eretz Yisrael, that other Sh’vatim might follow suit and B’nai Yisrael might be condemned to wandering in the desert another 40 years.
There are those commentators who hold that the hearts of Gad and Reuven were in the right place and that they had every intention, of their own volition, of taking part in the wars and, in fact, preceeding the rest of B’nai Israel into battle.
There were other commentators who viewed the desire of Gad and Reuven to settle on the East side of the Yarden as representing greed, a secular approach to Eretz Yisrael and a tendency toward separatism vs. communal responsibility.
Regarding Moshe Rabbeinu’s response to the pledge of Sh’vatim Gad and Reuven to fight in the upcoming war; “then you shall be vindicated from Hashem and from Israel,” Rabbi Artscroll cites Yoma (38a) on Perek 32, posuk 22;
It is not enough for one to know that one’s actions are proper in Hashem’s eyes. One must also act in such a way as to not engender suspicion on the part of human beings.
But, the most poignant explanation of the situation comes from the Tiferet Yehonatan who is quoted in the sefer “Torah Gems” where he states, on “Shall your brothers go off to war, and shall you sit here?”;
“‘…When your enemies attack Israel — you shall sit here’ — you will remain in peace in whatever country you are living in? Do not think so for an instant, because a war in defense of Israel is a war for the survival of the entire Jewish people whereever they are.’” (Torah Gems, Aharon Yaakov Greenberg, Parsha Matos, page 156.)
This explanation is as poignant now; in the context of the nearly four years subsequent the expulsion from Gush Katif and the Shomron and as the chickens of “disengagement” keep coming home to roost despite whatever spin Olmert, Ramon, Bibi, Peres, etc. may have put on subsequent events in Gaza. The poignancy of the above citing comes into clearer focus in that the Sharon/Olmert regimes, as well as Netanyahu who voted for expulsion, stole or were a party to the theft of everything from the Gush Katif residents. These morally corrupt little men stand in continuous, direct, blatant, disdainful violation of the very laws they forced through Knesset, regarding compensation and resettlement of the people that they expelled.
The rockets, mortars, sniping attacks on Sderot, Ashkelon and other Negev locations have been largely silent for a number of months since the January “ceasefire” ending Operation Cast Lead, although at least one report has Hamas preparing to resume their Gaza terrorist attacks into southern Israel in earnest. Meanwhile, Hezbollah continues to rearm in the North to levels far exceeding even pre-2006 war levels.
It was nearly four years ago that Israel left parts of the land of Israel because of the prevailing mindset of the typical Israeli in Tel Aviv, Haifa, etc. “the war is not at our doorstep”, “that the settlers are the root of the problem,” not an existential enemy sworn to our destruction. Since then, Israel has paid, and continues paying a steep price for its regime’s malfeasance — the Lebanon conflict, this year’s Gaza war, Bibi’s supplication to Hussein Obama’s Yudenrein policies toward Israel and more. Israelis of our generation can’t seem to relate to the point regarding Sh’vatim Gad and Reuven; We wish to settle our families on the East side of the Yarden and will fight alongside our brethren in the War to capture the Land of Israel.
But to repeat yet again a point which ought to relate to our generation, that is — if most Israelis are not so myopic, or conveniently amnesic, as to not remember; we felt betrayed when we were attacked at the Munich Olympics, on the Holy day of Yom Kippur, or when an Air France plane was hijacked to Entebbe. Don’t dare feel betrayed, indignant ever again as long as you tolerate expedient and preemptive immorality within the Jewish Nation. For the Secular Israeli who supported expulsion of his Jewish brothers and apathetically gave little thought to them, caring only for his own personal comfort and convenience, caring for, craving a distorted, misleading sense of “the normal life” of the nations, perhaps nothing Jewish could ever be sacred again.
And so, this caring for and craving for one’s narrow personal comfort and sense of “the normal life” of the nations segues into Parsha Masei
which teaches us that “Hashem spoke to Moshe… by the Jordan, at Yericho” telling him to speak to the B’nai Yisrael and tell them (Artscroll Stone Chumash, Sefer BaMidbar, Peek 33, p’sukim 51-56, pages 922-923);
When you cross the Jordan to the land of Canaan, you shall drive out all of the inhabitants of the Land before you; and you shall destroy all their prostration stones; all of their molten images…. You shall possess the Land as an inheritance by lot to your families…. But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the Land before you, those of them whom you leave shall be pins in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they will harrass you upon the Land in which you dwell. And it shall be that what had meant to do to them, I shall do to you.
Rabbi Artscroll (page 923) then cites the Rashbam and follows with it’s own commentary;
… If they fail to do so, they will suffer the fate Hashem had intended to impose upon the Canaanites, and be driven out.
Only in the perspective of Hashem’s wisdom can this passage be understood. No human ruler has the right to decree that an entire population is to be… exiled, but Hashem revealed that the Canaanite presence was incompatible with both the Land’s holiness and Israel’s mission on earth. History is the most conclusive proof of this, for the fact was that the Jews could not bring themselves to eliminate all of the Canaanites, with the result that the Jews were drawn to idolatry, debauchery, and were in turn periodically oppressed and finally exiled.
Yehuda Nachshoni’s “Studies in the Weekly Parashah (Parsha Masei, page 1174) cites the Ramban who says that;
Parsha Masei constitutes a legal foundation for our national resurrection in the land of our forefathers. It is our basis for being rooted in the land through conquest…, demonstration of legal posssession, through settlement…
Nachshoni then cites (ibid) the Ohr HaChayim’s interpretation of “They will vex you in the land wherein you dwell”;
This verse, he says, prophesies on the results of partial conquest, in which a hostile element remains on a part of the land. These are his words: “Not only will they take hold of that part of the land you have not merited yourselves. They will even vex you on that part of the land that you have merited and which you do inhabit, saying, ‘Get up! Leave!'”
And so we see today that because a misguided unrooted secular regime, anxious for disengagement of Israelis from their Jewish roots and spirituality, has not asserted its rightful, just, legal and complete posssession of those parts of Eretz Yisrael currently within its control, i.e. Gush Katif, Yehuda and Shomron, the Jordon Valley, the Golan, the Arabs repeatedly and brazenly claim Tel Aviv, Yaffo, Haifa and more as theirs and claim the “right of return” to Jewish land of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who were NEVER indigenous. They therefore continue to threaten Israel that if their terms for a second Arab state beside Jordon are not met, they will “abandon” a “two-state solution” and overwhelm, destroy and eliminate us by sheer numbers.
Never mind that a “two-state” solution will make us sitting ducks as the sharks; Egypt, Jordon, Syria, Iran and her clients Hamas and Hezbollah circle around Eban’s “Auschwitz borders” clamoring to toss us into the sea and annihilate us. Never mind that the regime placed and continues to place its governed, the B’nai Yisrael, in dire peril by its repeated pre-meditated, abject failure to;
- hold on to Gaza,
- to eliminate Arafat and the PLO instead of permitting them free passage to Tunis (to be resurrected later),
- to win and achieve its objectives in both the Lebanon conflict and Operation Cast Lead
- to forcibly liberate it’s captives, alive, rather than suffer humiliation of surrendering a mass terrorist murder and other terrorists in exchange for Jewish body-bags, one could go on and on.
- to stand up, with unequivocal Torah-rooted backbone and ideology against those forces, including the current super-power head of state, who would attempt to exert massive political and diplomatic pressure upon the Jewish nation to bring about her own destruction.
So it is that for the twin points of this doubleheader Parsha, and probably more, every believing Jew belongs taking part in battling a destructo regime, a corrupt, divisive system of governance on all of it’s levels, to his fullest and beyond and to the extent that he can.
May we, the B’nai Yisrael be zocha that our brethren — the refugee families from Gush Katif be permanently settled and be made totally whole, that our dear brother Jonathan Pollard and captive Gilad Shalit and the other MIAs be liberated alive and be returned to us in ways befitting Al Kiddush Hashem and that we fulfill Hashem’s blueprint of B’nai Yisrael as a Unique people — an Am Segula, not to be reckoned with as with “the nations” and may we be zocha the Moshiach, the Ge’ula Shlaima, as Dov Shurin sings; “Yom Hashem V’Kol HaGoyim”, the Ultimate Redemption, bim hay v’yameinu — speedily, in our time”, — Achshav, Chik Chuk, Miyad, Etmol!!!
Good Shabbos!
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Moshe Burt, an Oleh, is a commentator on news and events in Israel and Founder and Director of The Sefer Torah Recycling Network. He lives in Ramat Beit Shemesh.
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